[andix]

They probably suffer from a lot of sign ups with fake IDs and with criminal intent. So I get that they are rather strict.

Another thing to consider: cloud providers are not very interested in individuals as customers. They usually want companies as customers, that also buy more than a 3$ vserver. A solution for this problem could be a sign-up fee (50 or 100$), to pay for an extended manual vetting of customers, that is then added to the account balance.

[pid-1]

> Another thing to consider: cloud providers are not very interested in individuals as customers

A key theme in the "cloud vs data center" story is that most public cloud providers (AWS, etc...) were really easy to sign up, requiring a CC and nothing else.

Meanwhile, hardware vendors wouldn't even talk to you as an individual / small business.

[HansHamster]

Tried to sign up for gcloud a couple of months ago using my >12 year old google account. Long story short, while I technically managed to sign up, I never managed to get my GPU quotas increased to anything above 0, support is non-existent and contacting sales (which seems to be the 'official' way, but is only really intended for business customers?) never got a response...

Meanwhile, my small server (not Hetzner) has been running for many years without any issues, never had to send them anything after I signed up...