Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gud | Hacker News Reader

I was a happy Vultr customer until the day I tried to get port 25 unblocked. Instead of getting it unblocked I received a ”sorry not sorry” copy paste from some senior sales guy.

I had spent thousands of dollars on their services running my servers for years.

Needless to say I immediately dumped them, moved to Hetzner and 1 week later I had my own mail server running(still do).

View on HN

That's odd. I had a single HDD vps for a few months, back when they offered those, and they immediately unblocked port 25 when I asked them via a support ticket. At the time I had expected more pushback about it, or clarifying questions. I kept using that same server for many years until they stopped offering that tier of server and force stopped it many years later.

The replacement vps I'm currently using still has the port blocked because I haven't felt the need to send email like that in quite a while.

I tested them out maybe like 7-9 years ago and that's the reason I didn't continue. 25 blocked by default. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean sure they are trying to discourage spammers but just outright blocked by default seemed a bit overboard to me

That’s pretty well standard for VPS providers at this point isn’t it?

no, it isn't as far as I'm aware

Lesson here is always be transparent about your product. If you're permanently blocking ports by default, put some emphasis on that limitation during the sales process.

Maybe they did a risk analysis. Maybe they don't have the bandwidth to create a vetting process. Either way, be transparent.

> I mean sure they are trying to discourage spammers but just outright blocked by default seemed a bit overboard to me

How would you go about discouraging spammers, if not using a block that is removed if you ask?

(They removed my block in the first 2 months of my service, all I did was ask)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com