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Comment by nlitened | Hacker News Reader

Once I made an account at OVHcloud and decided to rent a server for 400 EUR/mo. My request was rejected, stating that I should try renting cheaper servers first for a few months, before my account would be allowed to rent more powerful machines.

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AWS does the same. Try creating a new account and deploying a GPU EC2 instance. You won't be able and need to contact support and explain the project you have in mind and how you want to control spending.

It’s basically the same idea as applying for a line of credit

I had the same experience with Digital Ocean. Thankfully there were several other providers happy to take my money immediately.

DO will sign off in minutes (or did for me)

Almost every VPS provider does this.

Why?

fraud prevention

Fraud, its very likely people doing that are using stolen cards and will not pay, so the provider will be slapped with a loss for the service rendered and then a dispute on the card.

Why let them rent a cheaper server? What will the discover in a month or so that they don't know at the start?

It will start to build a positive reputation for the client, prompting the provider to take the greater risk.

> What will the discover in a month or so that they don't know at the start?

That at least the card they're paying with is not stolen (the real owner would start a dispute).

Whether theyre paying their bill or not

Are bank cards that bad compared to cash or cryptocurrency? Why don't they let pay with cryptocurrency which cannot be charged back?

With crypto you would need to pre-pay... And with many of the charging models of cloud offerings that is actually quite complex thing. Same really goes for deposited credits of fiat. What should happen when you run out? How fast should your resources be killed?

So it means you won't get charged a ridiculous amount if someone DDOS'es your server. Cryptocurrency is definitely superior.

Because if you pay with a stolen credit card and use the server to do a bunch of fraud/spamming etc there's nothing but downside for the provider. If they ask you to start out slow, and you establish yourself with them as a good client, then they will give you more freedom.

Why not demand payment with cryptocurrency then?

Because, in the words of the parent, "if you pay with [stolen cryptocurrency] and use the server to do a bunch of fraud/spamming etc there's nothing but downside for the provider"?

Because most cryptocurrency-paying clients are spammers, drug markets, or child pornographers.

And if you only ask for this after denying a fiat payment, then the fraction of those clients who also have cryptocurrency is near zero so it's not worth doing. Corporations won't buy crypto to buy their servers with, because they consider it a high risk.

And you still have to give back the crypto if a court finds it was stolen.

It prevents the other kind of HN headline: I tried AWS for the first time last week and got a bill for $3 million this week. Help

Including GCP and AWS, even: you need to open support requests to gain access to the larger instance types (and to raise the quotas.)

Some let you enter more KYC data, and maybe use a different form of payment, to bypass this.

I tried signing up for their public cloud and got rejected with the same reasoning.

I wanted to use their object storage and some on demand compute, so that was a complete blocker.

I have had this experience with some EU companies too. They seem oblivious to the idea that renting an inferior service is going to cost the client more in lost productivity or similar. I don't think it's ideological, more they're worried about getting stuck with an unpaid bill; but in my case I couldn't even get thme to accept a deposit or prepayment because they weren't used to that sort of request.

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