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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

DigitialOcean is a hotbed for hosting spam/abusive domains, spam/abusive email hosting (used to host temp emails for creating fake accounts on other platforms), and hosting abusive VPNs/proxies.

The good thing is, this is very easy to detect when things are hosted on DO.

The bad news is, companies are harsh on DigitalOcean and will have some level of false positives.

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I have a postfix server I've hosted on DO for over 15 years. It is only on the UCEPROTECT block lists that block all of DO, everything else is clean. I use it mostly for receive-only and use Amazon SES to send anything where deliverability to customers is important.

What's a solid low cost ($5/month) VPS provider that is below the radar for this kind of broad brush blocking based on guilt by association? Thinking of making a move, but I kind of hate to give up the 15 years of good reputation on my IP address and starting over.

Over here at https://mnx.io we fit that description, and we do our best to keep our IP space clean.

Is this DO specific? Aren't there other hosting providers with competitive rates, or is there something about DO that makes it especially good for this sort of thing?

If all you want are virtual servers (==droplets), DO is one of the more expensive options around. Of course substantially cheaper than AWS/Azure/GCP, but much more expensive than Hetzner/OVH/Netcup or anything on lowendboxes.com).

What DO has is some of the best content marketing around (great tutorials on server stuff) and scale. The first attacts beginners (which includes most of the spammers and hackers), the second puts them on people's radar.

There are many, many US and UK hosting providers with the same price: $5/month VPS with 1 GB ram, 1 virtual CPU, and 1 TB bandwidth

It's not DO specific, per se, but relatively speaking DO is a big enough player to notice in a sea of bottom feeders.

No it's not DO specific. It's just that DO is popular for whatever reason.

> for whatever reason

it's very, very, very simple to use.

some people can't even navigate AWS or GCP, not to mention that the pricing is unclear as it can be. for people learning by practice it's a nightmare.

The fact that there's an entire consulting industry around helping people figure out very basic pricing for very basic tasks on AWS should be a wake-up call that their documentation and calculators are awful.

Then again I'm sure there's no incentive to improve it, since if for whatever reason you were laid off from AWS... you could have a lucrative consulting gig the next day helping people with the blindingly obvious consumer pain points you refused to resolve.

Reminds me of this thread:

> "Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation. It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953592

I'm pretty sure one of the major reasons AWS is useful to large companies is that it removes prices and billing as far as possible from the place where you actually create resources. This enables people to just do stuff without the usual red tape involved in buying something.

If you want to see pieces as you do stuff you can go to the Google Cloud

While it’s less applicable to the VPS options, the open ended pricing of AWS and GCP gives people starting out or with very little monetary slack a lot of heartburn. And you do still need to have an account that covers the whole kahuna.

There's probably some HOW-TO that was created that went through the process using DO, so now everyone else using it now also uses DO.

Because they give out free credits, and they suck at handling abuse, both of those attract bad actors

The funny thing is that amazon's cloud has way more abuse going on but no one can justify blocking all of amazon the same way.

I block DO IPs from SMTP because of spam/phishing.

Sometimes I think the bargain-basement hosts like DO exist simply so we have an easy group to block/avoid.

Some innocents get caught in that crossfire, however.

So things like personal sites and blogs should be hosted on expensive hosts? Not reasonable.

Reasonable or not, the company you keep is treated as a thing.

As far as I can tell, Google Blogger is still a pretty reasonable site for a blog and some static pages. And it’s free. Of course you may not like that option for various other reasons.

Yes, guilt by association is a thing. I was hit in the crossfire with it as well a long time ago.

False equivalence. There are many free/low price options for 'personal sites and blogs' that aren't sleazy hosting companies if cost is your key differentiator. Now, if it's "I will only accept an option where I can paint my bikeshed the exact color I want, with any brush I choose to use", then yeah, you've painted yourself into a bit of a corner options-wise and may end up as collateral damage. TANSTAAFL.

The reality is many people don't know the "reputation" of DO, see it as a cheap hosting site with good tutorials, and start using it.

They then get caught in the crossfire, but the correct complaint would be to DO not to the people who are taking the relatively reasonable and easy way out of "ban this part of the Internet, it sucks."

Sure, but the OP made out like the only options for personal stuff were cheap, shitty hosting providers, or expensive ones. And that's not true. We can't make people do research, but don't equate "lack of due diligence" with "lack of options".

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