[fragmede]

the reason they're doing this is because of credit card fraud. the attacker takes a stolen credit card, signs up for their service, and then runs up a huge bill. when the credit card owner discovers this, they do a chargeback, which means the hosting provider is out the money. do this enough times and the hosting provider gets kicked off their credit card processor and can't take payments anymore.

so yeah, it sucks, especially for privacy aficionados. there are places online that will take your untraceable Moreno (XMR) for hosting, but they end up getting used to anonymously host CSAM until the feds take that and hopefully the people creating that down as well.

[lolinder]

The issue OP has here isn't that they want anonymity, it's that the demands that this particular hosting provider is making are bizarre.

This is not the norm yet for hosting providers, and you don't have to pay with Monero to avoid having to send a photo of the credit card you used to pay for a service. Just pick almost any other hosting provider and they'll happily accept your credit card via an online checkout flow and be done with it until they get an abuse report.

[lbotos]

A decade ago at the provider I worked at we’d routinely ask for id verification like this for accounts that tripped our fraud signal system.

[fragmede]

it's not bizarre and totally makes sense from the perspective of the hosting company being used for nefarious purposes and not wanting to get shut down. tragedy of the commons and all.