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Comment by TurdF3rguson | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I'll try to do it and report back on how easy it was.

Thanks. I'd like to better understand the origin of DO's bot activity, and look forward to your report!

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.

Yours is likely issued from a US bank so you will experience less friction than the rest of us.

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