I was thinking about a feature providing callbacks when the hypervisor running your instance fails.
I think it's completely unreasonable to expect a status update on every single thing that might go wrong in Digital Ocean's infrastructure. If a single hypervisor/server fails, that could be ANYTHING. Bad drives, flaky memory, failed fans, etc., etc. This stuff happens ALL THE TIME and does not warrant a system wide update that something is wrong with the service, simply because there is nothing wrong with the service. All the other bits are functioning normally.
A loss of a box is expected and shit happens. Architect for it, or expect it to fail at some point. Everything dies eventually.
This is precisely what everyone with a virtual machine (or a physical machine i guess) should be doing. Set up your puppet/chef/salt/ansible configs, make sure they are up to date. Use those to deploy your application, and that way when something goes sideways you can use the same configuration to bring up a new VM immediately.
THIS is the power of virtualization, and if you're not doing this, you're doing it wrong.
So, I'll get a callback from my provider when my server is down...
Unfortunately, that callback is POSTed to a server that is already running on my provider, so I never see it :)
(Assuming that you mean that the callback is an external thing, i.e. provider -> customer. Also, I suppose I could host the callback receiving server on another provider. But I don't want to.)
I think this is mostly a marketing problem. They could provide simple statistics of possible types of failures and its causes. They could show average response for each type of failure. You don't have to update this all the time. No one expects full fledged service for $5 clouds, but there are many ways of letting customers know what they're getting beforehand. Simply dismissing every minor glitch "because it's cheap" doesn't give customers a good impression.
I think it's completely unreasonable to expect a status update on every single thing that might go wrong in Digital Ocean's infrastructure. If a single hypervisor/server fails, that could be ANYTHING. Bad drives, flaky memory, failed fans, etc., etc. This stuff happens ALL THE TIME and does not warrant a system wide update that something is wrong with the service, simply because there is nothing wrong with the service. All the other bits are functioning normally.
A loss of a box is expected and shit happens. Architect for it, or expect it to fail at some point. Everything dies eventually.
Also, $5 a month.