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Comment by thereandhere | Hacker News Reader

Is one still required to submit all their personal information (ID card details, proof of address, etc.) before the servers can be useful? Previously you had to do it, or SMTP ports (etc.) would be blocked until you did.

If that's still the case, is it at least made known that the servers are crippled, prior to starting your account creation process (previously it wasn't, which I found shady)?

My experience so far is that the servers are okay, but the website's UI could be clunky-ish, support to be unresponsive and the aforementioned shady business with requesting personal-information to enable services.

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IMO, requesting identity is perfectly normal - albeit a bit annoying, but I get the point. Take Hetzner, for example.

Bullshit it's normal. Only a couple of hosts do this.

Don't try to normalize this stuff, there's no reason hosting companies should need scans of their customers IDs.

It's usually the low budget hosts that do this, since those will attract more shady "customers"

Easy way to get rid of those

Pretty much every physical hosting provider I use (i.e. a company that provides physical boxes or slots in a data center) have required a scan of an ID to setup your account.

So yeah, pretty normal.

If you're physically going into the DC, yeah that's normal.

ID scans for colo with remote hands? Nah.

We're quite far from either of those anyway.

I don’t believe they do this now.

I am using Scaleway for hosting my own mail server and never sent them an ID. They have my credit card info, of course, but that’s it.

How are you running your email? Is it you primary email?

so them blocking a port that can be used for sending Spam mail, without you identifying yourself, is shady?

Yes. But who cares, there are many better services.

Care to name the one(s) you recommend and why?

Rather not, I'm still glad it's not very well known in SV or mentioned on HN. Sorry.

I tried scaleway, and I'm glad I didn't try to move my personal SMTP server there.

The other issue was that I can't run my own kernel there, which was also non-obvious before purchasing. They make it look like it's baremetal, but it's limited in this way.

Now I'm on a fully virtualized vmware VM where I can do pretty much anything, including running a kernel with WireGuard included. And it's half the price of 1-XS for the same specs and no blocked ports and no uploading of my ID somewhere I don't trust.

Aruba Cloud?

Then you declare yourself wrong.

If I don't know better services exist then from my PoV they are not available and so may as well not exist.

While spam is a real issue and it's well justifiable for a company to request some identity confirmation, it is also not particularly wrong to label not disclosing the requirements upfront to be a sort of a dark pattern. It surely can be somewhat frustrating if you've signed up only to see that there are some extra requirements you haven't anticipated.

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