P.S. Also. I would avoid hosters (and other Internet services) that have political slogans on their site ("support Ukraine", "BLM", whatever). They will easily turn off paying customers for the sake of agenda and virtue signaling, whether it comes from a news feed or a single abuse complaint.
I replied to the ticket saying, "How am I DDoSing someone when the bandwidth/packet-rate graphs you host show I am not?" to which they acknowledged it was a false report, unrestricted my node and closed the ticket. Not a big deal but still odd that they did not first check their own bandwidth graphs. That to me appeared to be a front-line customer support training issue.
I should add that the player was really upset that their exploit code could not crash my server. It happened a couple times so I found the packet that took it down and used a simple iptables string filter to drop it. That is when they went with the false reporting tactic.
In my case, Linode opened an “AUP violation” ticket with a copy of the report, the steps they required to close the ticket (essentially: fix it and explain corrective measures), and a time when they would disable the server otherwise (which was something like 24 hours). It sounds like itch.io decided to ignore the AUP violation ticket and their server was disabled after 24 hours, just like the ticket said it would. (Waiting on a support ticket instead of calling also seems like a weird bad choice when your whole site is offline.)
I guess, having some first-hand experience with Linode’s malware handling process, that itch.io were at fault here, but I guess there may be more to the story they haven’t shared or weren’t clear on.
[0] Actually twice; some internet vigilante hooked up a virus scanner to a web crawler and was sending false positive reports directly to the abuse address for the netblock. After the second one I kindly suggested Linode stop accepting these reports, and never heard anything again.
Did you see the part where they removed the content within 24 hours?
At least if you own the hardware, you won't lose your data (except in extreme cases where the government takes it, but if this is the case you're screwed and data / service loss is the least of your worries).
For colocation you probably won't loose the data but the company you chose can still disconnect you. And it's not uncommon in certain countries that police will take the whole rack belonging to different customers when they do police raids against pirating, mainly because they're incompetent but also trying to find other violators.
When we receive a valid abuse report that resolves to one of our IPs, we open a ticket (and send an email) to let you know. The ticket provides details about the abuse report we received, how to resolve it, and the timeframe in which we need a response before we remove access to the abusive content.
Since most abuse reports we process are the result of a system compromise and aren't intentional, we can be flexible. If you need additional time to investigate an abuse report we've sent you, all you need to do is respond to our ticket and ask.
If you dispute the validity of a report or believe an abuse reporter is acting in bad faith, that's feedback we listen to – you just need to respond to our ticket.
In general, if you're communicating with us and acting in good faith, we'll work with you on these matters.
By having applications and data distributed over multiple providers automation can change DNS when a provider is having issues even if said issues are self inflicted such as a lazy over-reaction to an abuse report. It may not be feasible for a company to have all their data replicated on all providers. This is probably OK. N+1 for hard to replicate data may be sufficient to have a degraded service rather than a full site down critical outage.
Another benefit to having multiple providers is letting them know the better they treat you, the more significant weight your automation will give to spinning up nodes there. Make them compete for your money.
