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Comment by treesknees | Hacker News Reader

I ran into issues several years ago where the IP of my DigitalOcean droplet always seemed to be on block lists or banned for abuse from various services. As a result it made it impossible to use as a VPN server or mail server. The early ability to spin up and charge hourly rates made them good targets for spammers compared to companies like Linode, who at the time didn't have hourly rates.

I have to imagine things have gotten better, but it did taint my view of DO as more of a dev playing field than a reliable hosting provider.

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It hasn't gotten better. I had to plead with a postmaster at a large ISP to unblock my droplet because they banned all DO's IPs after they were refusing to manage the way spammers were abusing the service. Not a "we're sending to spam" ban but a hard 550 connection refused. The postmaster suggested I do some Googling on the topic and I was shocked at what I found, so I can see why they had to throw their hands up and block the lot.

I appreciate it's not easy problem but it's clear the community felt they were being ignored and DigitalOcean did nothing to try and limit the spread. For example, moving to a model like other providers have where you need to request permission to send mail from support.

A selection over two years: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-d...

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-sp...

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious...

In my experience this is 100% the case with all IaaS providers. AWS's entire IP space is basically on all email block lists for example.

I find this extremely hard to believe.

EDIT: Just to clarify, AWS has a lot of IPs, over 100 million [1]. Let’s just speculate that 1/50th might be in an overall pool for customer allocation. Do you really think the majority of 2M IPs would come back blacklisted in some form? I haven’t dug in to this to actually see if this is the case, but it would seem laughable to even begin to think that this might be the case..

[1] https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/in...

I think the wording should be changed. I would agree that all their EC2's and lightsail instances would be in the RBL/RSL's. AWS have an email service specifically for this use case.

I would be shocked if even that were true. Well, looks like I’ve got some homework for tonight.

They come and go get listed and delisted so you may find your own nodes to be hit and miss. That is for the well behaved RBL's and RSL's. Spamcop, Spamhaus, Uceprotect will expire nodes and networks after a period of no reported spam. There are a few others that will leave things listed for a long time. I am only basing my experience on those three. The less costly a VPS provider, the more often they get listed. Ramnode for example is almost always blocked. If you have long running nodes, it is unlikely you will find them blocked outside of Uceprotect level-2.

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