All cloud providers I've tested will reject proxy cards, which are assigned from prepaid card pools. More businesses seem to be doing this as of late. It's rather unfortunate, since proxy cards are a fantastic fraud prevention device.
Considering how many people on the internet talk about using these cards for evading contractual obligations (e.g. cancelling the card instead of going through the contract cancellation process and paying the termination fee, if any), it's surprising their acceptance has lasted as long as it has.
If by contractual obligations you mean "clauses that are most probably illegal but the average person will usually just shut up and pay rather that lawyer-up against a multibillion corporation", then yes I can see how many, me included, just opt for one of those cards whenever possible.
Cancelling is oftentimes borderline impossible. Especially for people who can’t spend all day on a phone getting shifted around countless times or waiting forever for online support to respond (and sometimes never follow up).
Maybe if companies didn’t make cancellation processes so actively hostile to users or throw in mysterious charges that continue accruing for all eternity, people wouldn’t be so uncomfortable using their normal card?
I would be with you if so many corporations didn't already exploit customers with the whole "yeah, tough luck, whatcha gonna do about it? have fun suing us" attitude. You can't blame customers for taking the same approach when that's already corporate America's MO.
And don't forget that on top of exploitative practices, corporations frequently game the legal process too... like forcing customers to sign away their rights to sue in court, and all that.
It's almost tragic that how many times things that are "legal", are neither right nor good. In ideal world, atleast, those qualities should have been mandated to make something a law.
Either laws are way too old for the current times or were made worse by lobbying groups in favour those with might.
Things don't seem to be getting better (cookie annoyance being one example) unfortunately.
No, it's not, an even if it was, that would create no obligation of a vendor to let you use it to establish an account. The effect of legal tender comes when making an attempt to pay an existing debt, not when trying to establish a relationship in which charges might be incurred in the future.
I use them all the time to ensure I don't get auto enrolled for garbage services. Like when you buy something from Nordic track and there's no way to opt out of auto enrolling for iFit. It's predatory and feel no shame in my tactics. I've also caught a number of breeches and just plain old scummy businesses (three times I got pings on one time use Amazon cards).
If you hand your classic card details to a company like Oracle or AWS, your card isn't exposed to the same threats as when you use it to buy something at the gas station.
AWS overcharging my card due to their unclear pricing structure seems like a much more realistic & costly threat than someone putting a skimmer in a gas station
For what it's worth, I've been able to use a prepaid card with <WELL-KNOWN LARGE CLOUD PROVIDER> for a while now without any problems. Maybe they're not all created equal.
I’m willing to bet it’s AWS with 90% certainty - they seem to have very lenient card policies compared to other cloud platforms I’ve worked with. (GCP, on the other hand, won’t even accept debit card - only credit)
> GCP, on the other hand, won’t even accept debit card - only credit
That's not true in my experience: I've been paying my GCP bill with debit cards from three different banks for years. (They were branded as VISA or Mastercard, mind you, but still debit cards.)
I figured it might be a little imprudent to explicitly mention what I'm getting away with, and with whom. Especially in a public forum where many of this company's employees may very well see it. I'd be shocked if they took action, admittedly. Still, I feel like it's good policy never to explicitly invite misfortune upon yourself.
> All cloud providers I've tested will reject proxy cards, which are assigned from prepaid card pools. More businesses seem to be doing this as of late. It's rather unfortunate, since proxy cards are a fantastic fraud prevention device.
You do realize that letting people anonymously host whatever they want from reputable ASNs is a bad thing, right?
I have also really enjoyed Oracle Free Tier services. Across all the cloud providers I consider them the absolute best. I have not paid Oracle one single dime in over two years and have done things I’d have been happy to pay for.
The value to being able to have a public reverse SSH proxy to a home network system is great!
While it has none of the nice UX my opinion is that Oracle Cloud Free Tier is the spiritual replacement for the old Cloud9 IDE which Amazon bought and then destroyed. Again, not as nice, but for me I can get the equivalent compute resource that Cloud9 would have provided and just use emacs entirely for free. No need to play stupid games with AWS credits or whatever.
The ARM64 VMs are unbelievable. I'm running all my personal stuff on one instance with 4 cores, 24GB RAM and 200BG disk space for free. Before I payed Digital Ocean 5$ a month for one Intel core with 1GB RAM and 20GB disk space.
> The free tier is very generous and what I use for personal projects and hosting.
Do you have all your personal projects and hosting in a single account?
I’m familiar with the AWS best practice of creating one account per service-region. But that doesn’t seem compatible with free tiers.
The Oracle FAQ [1] says anyone who has not previously signed up for free tier is eligible. I think that means an individual, but it could be interpreted as a service or project.
According to AWS one account per organization is eligible for free tier [2]. That implies to me I could have one organization [3] per project.
Saw this post of yours and got excited. However they won't accept my debit card or credit cards (both of which are used online for other services) and the sign in form craps out in various ways. The email confirmation process is very slow and is taking 10+ minutes to email me.
It's a terrible sign up process - ironic given the thread this has appeared in, but I cant read the article as it's been hugged to death.
Being a foreigner in Germany, all the same problems here. The number of places I cannot pay with my International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is staggering. "Sorry, the IBAN has to start with DE, else we cannot process your payment". E.g. I use the free version of Deepl.com a lot (another effect of being a foreigner), so I tried getting the pro version of deepl (despite it having only downsides, I don't want to freeload). The system, based on Stripe, gave some "try again later" generic error. Undeterred, I contacted support but after some internal investigation they discovered I was trying to use a Dutch bank account and that's not allowed.
Or a regular Dutch bank card, same EMV chip same everything as a German "EC-Karte", doesn't work in most places such as supermarkets and apothecaries. They keep (often angrily if I'm not the only person in line) asking if it's a credit card that I'm trying to pay with.
No, I don't have a credit card, that's another problem. So I tried to solve both problems at once by getting a bank account in Germany (most come with a CC), but because I haven't taken loans before, the local credit scoring agency can't give me a positive score and so I can't get a card number allocated. This system doesn't exist in the Netherlands where I'm from, I thought Germany was all about privacy, but the Schufa is apparently supposed to know everyone and you're encouraged to keep an eye on your score and be mindful of how things will impact it. Blows my mind. Not being known is enough of a problem that there's a legal requirement for some banks to offer Schufa-free services, except then you pay excessive fees (someone once said: it's expensive to be poor) and obviously you still won't get that credit card number. I don't want any credit, I can pay up front just fine, or e.g. for car rental I could put tens of thousands in some escrow if you want to cover all risk. I just want to pay for services just like everyone else.
I don't think PoW-based e-gold is the solution either, but there are a lot of hurdles still with simply paying for things in 2022.
What you are describing is iBan discrimination [0] and it is illegal. You can report this to authorities. Many international fintechs wrestle with this (N26, bunq) some started offering local iBans. Really annoying.
In the Netherlands we have iDeal, really nice, but only here. What do most banks not support? Instant transfer. We Dutch build our own system next to the EU one :s. It is getting better though (IE, Rabo to N26 is now finally instant).
Thanks for that tip! I was already wondering if there wouldn't be some requirement to treat all ibans equally in the European single market thing (SEPA), but didn't have time (and later forgot) to look into it.
A tip - in India, if you have a low credit score, you can still get a credit card if you ask for a "Fixed Deposit" linked credit card. With this option, you have to deposit some amount with the bank in an FD account (FD accounts are fixed term accounts, where you cannot withdraw money till the term is over, and also earn some minimal interest on the money deposited) , and that amount becomes your collateral for the card, and also acts as the credit limit of your card. If you are diligent and a financially prudent individual, the credit company often increases the credit limit later. Ask around if German banks have a similar thing.
In the US at least there's the concept of a prepaid credit card, basically you give the bank a deposit and then that becomes the limit on the card. You can close the card and get your deposit back. It's a way for people with awful or no credit to build up a credit history of on time payments. I had mine as a teen for about a year before the bank decided I was trustworthy and mailed me my deposit back and turned the prepaid credit card into a normal credit card. Might be a good option for you if Germany has something like that?
I thought prepaid credit cards were literally where you have to pre-pay: charge it with money. They're not accepted because of course if you load up exactly the 200 euros for the car rental and then drive the thing off a cliff, there is no point having your card on file to charge because it'll be empty. At least that's what I've heard, I'm no payment lawyer. At any rate also in OP the error says that the reason for the rejection might be that they tried to use a prepaid card.
Having a collateral like you describe sounds like a much better system than collecting data on entire countries' worth of people and make guesses about the odds they'll go bankrupt based on some super secret formula before you give them monthly loans they never knew they wanted.
No, people use "prepaid debit card" and "prepaid credit card" interchangeably for some reason(even me lol). This would be known as a secured credit card, because you are putting up collateral for it. That scheme would not work here because opening and closing real credit cards with security deposits (as opposed to virtual card numbers or prepaid debit cards) has a effect on your credit score. You couldn't do this more than a few times before banks start denying you based on your credit history. You don't really want these cards, as they make no sense financially. Essentially, you are loaning the bank your own money, and then the bank will charge you interest at standard credit card rates to use the money you have lent them. They are only for building a credit history then you get rid of them. This is actually the one I used to have https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/secured/
> Essentially, you are loaning the bank your own money, and then the bank will charge you interest at standard credit card rates to use the money you have lent them.
I have no words.
The credit card that I now managed to get by opening an account shared with my partner doesn't charge interest. It's a normal bank card except it has this non-IBAN number that I needed to pay for certain things. I expected those secured cards to work the same.
Is it normal to pay interest on what people in the USA afaik pay most things, like their groceries, with? I thought that only came into play when you overdraw or don't settle the bill at the end of the month.
I'm not sure if the one I've got now allows overdrawing (probably) but it's settled automatically and within a few days so interest beyond the hefty transaction fees already levied on the merchant doesn't make much sense to me, especially if I would put up the collateral on such a secured card.
You are correct, you don't pay interest if you completely settle the bill at the end of the month. Same with the secured card. In fact, the secured card I linked actually offers 2% cash back, so you get paid to use it in some sense as long as you pay it back in full every month. that is very normal with us credit cards. It's really just a method for the bank to see if you can handle paying your bill every month without risking their own money, I suppose. The minimum amount to open the card is just a 200$ deposit so it's not exactly high stakes. When I had mine the bank took initiative on its own after 6 months and sent me my deposit money back unprompted to turn it into a normal credit card. It's really not a thing that's expected to see normal day to day use for extended periods. To answer your question I would imagine most people pay for groceries with debit cards that are just tied to their bank account directly, not credit cards.
IME (lived 3 years in Germany) most Germans seem to think there is only one country in the world, that country being "Federal Republic of Germany around the 1970s or so".
Thanks for the tip, though they're two different systems: the credit score thing blocks a credit card which blocks various online and offline (mainly international) payments; the IBAN is more used for domestic payments and I expect Hungarian will be as often accepted as my Dutch IBAN. Maybe even less because NL presumably has less fraud and is geographically closer (NL is 15 minutes driving from where I live, which makes it even more mind-blowing that their regular bank cards are not accepted here).
I've got a credit card in the meantime via my partner who is German, but that means that the money on it isn't only mine so I avoid using it for things that aren't shared expenses in the first place.
I'd guess he's using a VPN and it triggered some kind of anti-fraud threshold. Lots of companies have been doing this lately, not just Oracle.
> "I'm sometimes baffled by how many businesses are out there that make the process of paying them insanely difficult."
I'm baffled as to how this thread is getting upvotes. The same thread was posted four days ago by the same user and did not get traction. HN is not your personal army.
Is it a good idea when the topic at hand is OP's personal beef with a merchant? It's a bad faith posting given the fact that the error message mentions "masking one's location or identity". OP mentions being a "Signal user since 2015" in a comment here but doesn't address the VPN possibility in the linked blog rant so I'm calling it here.
Nothing morally, but using a VPN, while not perfectly anonymous, correlates strongly with other anonymization measures taken by users. Users signing up with those IPs are more likely to be doing so anonymously.
There's nothing wrong with using it to hide your browsing habits or reduce tracking, but when you're signing up for cloud services, you're presumably already supposed to be providing your identity at that point, so that use case is moot. Someone could be stealing your identity and using it to sign up as well. Imagine the crimes you could be framed for in those situations.
It would be hard to keep the service cheap if there were a greater risk of bad actors using it.
I tried signing up without VPN and gave up after a few days. Credit card verification succeeded but it seems they need to manually upgrade your account. Support couldn't tell me how long that would take (system said 24h but took longer). And once that was done, you still can't order because you need to increase limits. I gave up at some point and went with another provider. Has been a long time that I've encountered a system that takes several days until they allow you to spend money.
Not at all, my stance is that people on HN should stop being useful idiots for the monopoly by shooting down new ideas and innovations on the grounds that 'BigTech does what I need already'. I don't see how that is at all similar. The world will be fine if people aren't allowed to anonymously pay for things online with US credit cards in order to set up cloud services. There are decentralized networks for that, and I'm sure many centralized ones that will accept payment methods anonymously as well (blackhats, I hope you're not listening).
Please refrain from ad hominem, especially since this was your first ever comment posted to HN.
I always find it funny that tech people can't host a personal website/blog on a server without it going down due to load - usually because the database is overloaded.
Yep, MySQL crashes for some reason from time to time. I'm eventually going to migrate this site from DigitalOcean to somewhere else, probably OpenBSD.amsterdam.
I just restarted MySQL so I should be good until the next time 5+ people try to access my site at once.
IBM cloud also acts in a similar weird, opaque and broken manner - apparently you can't even sign-up for its free account without an American (BigTech) email ID ... See https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/138908/unable-to... . I wonder if this has something to do with both Oracle and IBM being B2B company?
Years ago I just wanted to get a Sun Oracle UNIX Keyboard in classic Sun Layout. Getting through the entire purchase order process was nothing short of an ordeal.
I did however get the keyboard an am happily typing on it now.
I'm having to pay for Google Enterprise with my personal credit card because they won't accept my TransferWise-issued Visa Debit for it (claiming it's a pre-paid card).
My normal actively used credit card also got banned after using free tier for a while so i totally don't understand their standard. btw i just switched to aws.
I checked the cost estimator, I really do not see how is this pricing "tasty" in any way, seems pretty similar to AWS and definitely not lower than Digital Ocean or other cheaper 'cloud' options.
Oracle is wildly inconsistent and I'm still not sure if I like their offering or if I hate it.
The good:
- My page runs on the 1 AMD VM and it has been working fine for a few months.
- The VM is faster than the equivalent Github/Gitlab Pages offering and I have way more control.
- Using the ARM VMs under one hood gives a lot of performance and I setup a VM to migrate data from one rclone crypt remote to another crypt remote (which meant that the VM had to download the data and then upload which was brutally slow on my connection).
- It's great to be able to test out some things on a machine and not have to pay for it and I would gladly pay for more VMs if not for the bad...
The bad:
- I had issues activating my initial trial and it took a bit of back and forth to get it running because their fraud prevention system kept blocking me
- The ARM VMs aren't 100% free, but you get free VM time. Which means that after the 1st month trial, the VMs actually get suspended or put on hold, despite you not using up your allowance. I had a Bookstackapp instance running on one and I find one morning not being able to log in. After fiddling about and trying to figure out what to do, I decided to restore my backup on to a new VM but I never felt that these are reliable after that incident
- The entire management interface is hugely complex and lots of parts are hidden unnecessarily (try to find how to raise and ticket and then after a while, try to go and find where your incident is and where you can check its status...)
- You can't seem to get an old account deleted... I had messaged sales, support and a few others. I asked for help on Twitter as well, but while I got I think two emails about "your account is now deleted" I could still log in with that old account. But they DID suspend access to always free resources on that account... So I have this old account hovering, which was made to see what they offered and I could never reactive it to use that one and support suggested that the easiest way would be to make a new one.
- Their Oracle Agent/Resource Monitor is really resource intensive and it's one of the first things I recommend removing
- Their iptable rules are also quite restrictive and it's at the top of the list for things to remove when setting up a new vm
So, I believe I had mentioned this before, but you do get what you pay for. I still recommend them for anything that's not critical or that important and for someone wanting to dip their toes in managing a VPS and some other considerations, but otherwise pay for what you use and go for something that's simple, proven to work and reliable if all you're looking for is VPSes (Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner (although yesterday's post about someone losing data and getting 20 euros wasn't that positive), OVH, ServerCheap, etc).
Vast majority of businesses are extraordinarily inefficient. This is my favorite pass time to identify these inefficiencies. For example, majority of restaurants can eliminate customers waiting on waiters by simple app like toast. There is never any need for greeter who you must wait on to seat at table. You should be able to pay and leave using app like toast. There should be a jar of water at table so customers don’t have to call waiter to get water. The list goes on. But these businesses have no intention to provide meticulously best possible experience and they are not striving hard to improve. Their motto is people will pay them simply because they are there (same as classic Seinfeld line that people will see crappy shows because that’s what’s on TV). The story extends to virtually all businesses I come across day to day from coffee shops to Grocery store to pharmacies to gas stations to car dealers to car manufacturers to theme parks.
I used to wonder why these businesses don’t want to improve. I feel everything comes down to CEO. I imagines many of these CEOs are private jet ferrying creatures who probably never goes through the pain of their customers or don’t have keen eye for improvement. They stay busy in their happy bean counting and other MBA activities. There is no bottom up drive for feedback to these suits. Once the top leader is rich dude, priority of their life becomes different.
The relentless drive to examine, reflect and improve is something of a new phenomenon that likely only started with silicon and Silicon Valley. These cultures are as new as humans popping up among other mammals. This culture is picking up for sure but it will take few generations.
Not to be rude, but it seems you have strong opinions about things you know very little about. A good lithmus test: if you think the rest of the world is all stupid/ignorant/incompetent and misses something obvious, it is very very very likely that in fact you miss something obvious.
E.g. an app doesn't solve any problem for a restaurant because someone has to manage the app, manage data entry, show people his to use it, take decisions when to override the app ("they reserved for 20 minutes ago but didn't show up And that's our last table...") etc. This requires skills knowledge and guidance for everyone involved, And still much manual work to manage it. For. Big restaurant you would not be able to drop the greeter. In covid many restaurants have gone this route and many people actively avoid such restaurants.
E.g. jar of water - of course there's none, except for upscale restaurants where everyone orders wine, as the drinks are a major profit factor for most restaurants. Putting free water on the table will mean lower drinks orders.
Yes, of course not an expert but I come across fair amount of business and spend more time on these observations than most people I know. Restaurants don’t have to build apps. They just have to sign up to apps that already exists like toast. I have been to restaurants who meticulously improve customer experience by eliminating all waiting and ones who don’t care. These ideas are not mine. I am surprised that restaurants don’t learn best practices from each other.
About glass of jar. Again, it may be you who may be speculating. I have been to ones who provide them and others who don’t. It’s just attention to detail. Customer experience should come first before all else. What you think of as coercion could very well might be ignorance.
I hope you realize that the OP's issue has nothing to do with poor customer service, but rather the fact that they feel entitled to anonymously host whatever they want from a reputable cloud ASN. Oracle's Customer Service response omitted the reasoning. This tends to happen when the rejection is due to fraud detection, which itself tends to happen when using a VPN.
They may not be doing it for malicious purposes, but there's no way to be reasonably secure against that without blocking credit card transactions from masked locations (i.e. VPNs).
I think hyper optimizing could be good for growth, but it can very well cost too much. I often look at how Aliexpress accepts less popular payment methods and they ship anywhere. US and EU businesses straight up refuse to do one or the other (or both).
They just don't care about smaller buyers. It's their choice, so why not, I guess.
Hence, China will continue taking market share from the "developed economies" for the foreseeable future.
On the bright side, even with a normal credit card, your account is never billable unless you take the affirmative step to convert from Free Tier.
The free tier is very generous and what I use for personal projects and hosting.
- 2x AMD VMs each with 1GB RAM
- 4 ARM64 Cores and 24GB of RAM to divide up(or not) however you want.
- 200GB of Block Storage
- public IPv4 (and now IPv6) addresses for each VM.
- 10 TB/month egress.
Your upper limit is 4 VMs total because the minimum boot volume is 47GB, so that's the max you can subdivide the storage.