Why is console access on Digital Ocean so problematic?

I have been successfully running a Ubuntu 14.04 production server on D.O for nearly six months now. I couldn’t be happier with the level of support received from D.O staff and the excellent tutorials that helped me get going from scratch.

However, I cannot but think that D.O’s web based console access is its major problem area. In all these months of trying, I have only been able to get it working once or twice. Having reliable out-of-band access to the server is absolutely essential for an unmanaged service like D.O where the staff can’t login to your server when you are locked out of SSH.

Yesterday, I spent several hours trying to get console access to work without success after I was locked out of SSH. D.O Support were courteous and helpful, as always, but they obviously couldn’t login to fix the issue. I tried everything - accessing from a desktop, a laptop, a Macbook Pro, trying through Firefox, Safari and Chrome, adding incoming and outgoing rules in the Windows firewall to allow the suggested port range of 6000-7000, restarting my router to get a different dynamic IP for the internet connection to work around my IP being blocked by the server firewall - the works. Nothing helped until I was finally able to connect to SSH after restarting the router for the nth time.

D.O staff suggested that my ISP was blocking those ports, but I doubt it. The irony of the situation is that I am able to launch the web console of Linode (Lish) where I have a couple of servers without any issue at any time on any browser on the same ISP connection. It simply works.

So, my question is, why is D.O’s console access so troublesome and error prone when Linode can offer a similar service that works out of the box? And, why has this issue gone unresolved for so long? You only have to do a google search to find dozens of complaints on this issue going back two or three years.

I am not posting this as a rhetorical question but as a genuine concern. Heaven forbid running into a situation where I need out of band access to the production server and the console doesn’t work.

Is anyone using any tips or tricks to get console access working reliably?