Need Assistance with Account Suspension - Seeking Help from Digital Ocean Community

Hello Digital Ocean Community,

I’m a university student studying cloud computing, and I signed up for Digital Ocean through the GitHub Student Developer’s pack. I’ve also joined a local technology meetup group that uses Digital Ocean as our hosting platform for a website project. It is crucial for me to have access to the Digital Ocean services.

However, I received an email from Digital Ocean today stating that my account had been suspended due to potential platform abuse or misuse of services. I have reviewed Digital Ocean’s Terms of Service Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy, and do not believe I have violated any of their terms.

The only thing I did with my account was to host a dockerized Django website on a 1 GiB droplet with Ubuntu 22.04. I installed Docker and Docker Compose, used SCP to transfer my project files, created firewall rules to allow access to the website, and ran the server for about 30 minutes to test it (I just used HTOP to monitor resource usage).

I wonder if I misconfigured the firewall rules and if that could have triggered a security alert. Is that something that could have triggered the account to be suspended?

I have submitted a help ticket to appeal the suspension and explained my intended usage of the services. I’m not sure if there is anything else I can do at this point.

I would appreciate any feedback or advice from the Digital Ocean Community on how I could resolve this situation to regain access to the account.

Best regards, Matt