And it's ALWAYS been that way. A very long time ago I implemented a VPS hosting. How long ago? It was implemented using User Mode Linux. I want to say it was 2003. We had most of our success in a specific geographic region, and also within the Python community. We originally had automated sign-up, but found that if we got a signup from someone who's name we didn't recognize, it was basically guaranteed to be fraud.

In the early days it was slightly amusing to get calls from older folks trying to understand what a virtual server was.

There's a level of friction that is too much for some.

I'm attempting to soften that friction when I launch my PaaS

My concern over bots and misuse is a concern. I'm thinking of crippling the free service to allow full functionality but limiting it's use to really tiny files.