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by KronisLV 1614 days ago
> A note about credit cards

> Even for our free services, we require a credit card number. We know that's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not because we plan to charge you.

> But here's what happens if you give people freemium full access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining for cryptocurrencies.

> We could tell you we want to prevent crypto mining because we care about the planet, and that would be true. We also have a capitalism nerve that hurts when people spend our money gambling. Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and chaos.

I don't really have another alternative to offer here, but i appreciate the transparency and honesty of saying this, regardless of whether they're right or not.

I wish more companies out there actually explained their reasoning behind decisions, instead of essentially just going like: "We're doing this because of undisclosed reasons, please accept that this is how things are going to be."

Of course, in many cases you can come up with a few feasible reasons for why companies make many of their decisions, but being given first hand context for these things feels nice!

2 comments

The alternative is spending limits on the account, including being able to set it to $0 to essentially make it a "free tier" account.
Wouldn't they be able to detect mining? And shut down that VM? I think many hosters would like to have that...
It's not just miners, you also have people using your free or even cheap tiers for DDOS/PortScan/SSH Bruteforce. These ones burn your IP address so it's better to prevent it than to try to catch it later. A credit card check goes a long way as a barrier to entry.
As long as it is free miners will keep trying to get around it by for instance running tons of different free accounts each with a obfuscated mining system.

Even if you catch all just having them try will be a huge waste of resources.

Potentialy, but it’s much easier if they never have to look for VM’s mining at all.
Sure ... look for high CPU then anonymous miners cap their CPU usage. And a few legitimate users (and potential customers) get locked for reasons they don't understand.

Repeat with every other trick you use to detect abuse.

That just turns into a cat and mouse game.