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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Digital Ocean: allow me to do some extended verification so you know exactly who I am and reduce your risk. In exchange, there is no automated locking, rather we are contacted and have 24 hours to mitigate the issue.

Requirements:

* 1 year continuous ontime payments at $250+/mo usage

* automatic billing is set up

* billing limits are set up and have been reviewed within the last year

* copy of our business insurance and license

* u2f on all accounts

Fair?

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The first few items on your list are actually a part of what we meant by "having billing history with us". There are a number of things we look at in that bucket. We use these items as a part of validating users before taking any action (yes, we clearly failed on this account due to the credits which is a clear bug). As far as offering things like a copy of your business license or other means of verification that isn't a bad idea. As an example people paying with POs today are excluded from the algorithm already.

Please make it official, so that people can have peace of mind knowing that they've got that "verified" badge. People hate having to wonder whether they're at risk of crossing an invisible, inscrutable, and constantly changing threshold. See: PayPal and AdSense account forfeitures. You could do so much better than that.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted so hard - while I think your list of requirements perhaps aren’t the right ones, I like the idea in general. Have a process where I can make assurances of some form that we’re good guys, and treat me accordingly.

What is a "business license"?

Various businesses in the usa require licensure to operate. These are often done at state or even federal levels. Not every business has one, but even an EIN provides them more information about who's paying for the service.

Not every business has an EIN. I'm kind of surprised at the number of regulatory hoops you're willing to jump through to negotiate a minimal level of service.

Looking at it from the point of operations of the affected company, this doesn't sound like minimum level of service. Instead, DO was the entire business structure of the company. As a company, if you're entire business plan depends on the services of a 3rd party, it is not unusual to go through extra steps to ensure 3rd party can't end your business. Running an internet driven company from a consumer service from ATT/Spectrum etc is suicidal. If your network goes down, they'll fix it when the get to it. With a business level account, they have much more guarantees to keep your signal hot. Running a POC off of a free tier of AWS/DO/etc is fine, but these guys were well past POC.

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