Comment by TurdF3rguson

6 days ago

Actually it looks like it's because DO accepts Paypal, most hosts will require a credit card because of PP fraud but I guess they're going for markets where it's not common to have one. They do have free credits but PP billing requires a $5 charge which is already higher than a lot of other VPS plans.

No, it's not really because of PayPal. You can verify with a card, and stolen (or virtual) cards are cheap and easy to get.

Even if you do the PayPal way and pay $5, that's still better specs and lasts longer than what you get with a $5 VPS, because the trial credit is $200 for a few months (or if you go the commonly abused method: GitHub student, you can get $200 for a year).

And then combined with poor anti-fraud, poor abuse handling

  • I think it's probably harder to sign up for hosting with a credit card than you think. It was a struggle for me until I managed to get a secured credit card (A deposit is made against the limit) which is very different from a debit card (Almost nobody accepts these) or a virtual card (these were impossible for me to get)

    • I didn't specify credit card and what do you mean almost nobody accepts debit cards? My entire life I have pretty much only used debit cards everywhere and not once have I had an issue, especially not at hosting providers. Hetzner, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, GCP, I can keep going, all of these have accepted my debit cards.

      And I was also not just guessing when I said those things, I have been in those circles previously.

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