11 ms·

I want to give Oracle money but I can't

78 points by superdisk 4y ago

donatj 4y ago
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.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  I remember using a SUN keyboard on a pizzabox back in the 90s. I remember at the time thinking it was unusually nice to type on. How does your one connect to your PC? Did you have to buy a special ps2->USB adaptor?
  - donatj 4y ago
    It's USB, the last couple models of Sun keyboards were.
dotancohen 4y ago
> Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. > (Cannot access the database) Maybe they should try an Oracle database. Doesn't cost much. Lrf, guvf vf cbxvat sha ng gur vebal.
CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
I wonder what their credit card's customer support line said. When I've had similar declines, I've been able to get an explanation from them.
- 3np 4y ago
  Most likely it was not declined by them but by Oracle/their payment processor.
sammy2244 4y ago
They wouldnt accept my Revolut (Visa) card either. I just gave up in the end
nineteen999 4y ago
Welcome to the current state of the art in web application development in 2022 - Web 1.5
nnx 4y ago
"but their compute pricing is just too tasty to ignore" (linking to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html ) 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.
- InvaderFizz 4y ago
  Does anyone else beat $7/month/core for a non-shared ARM core? Because that is what Oracle is charging for non-reserved, on demand customers.
- berns 4y ago
  > definitely not lower than Digital Ocean 2 vcpu 8GB: DigitalOcean $ 60 with 4 TB transfer Oracle $ 25.75 with 10 TB transfer (DigitalOcean includes local ssd, but you don't want to use that.)
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    At that price range, you may as well just get a dedicated from Hertzner with unlimited gigabit transfers
InvaderFizz 4y ago
They will reject any temporary card number for sure, I believe they also reject all prepaid cards and debit-as-credit based on others experiences. 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.
- igetspam 4y ago
  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.
  - qwertox 4y ago
    You can use proxy cards in your day to day life. 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.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      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
      - ungamed 4y ago
        Especially as one is a 'once off' use, the other is billing on demand.
    - igetspam 4y ago
pretentious7 4y ago
I have also been having some rather inexplicable issues with paying oracle, it's really strange.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Have they not always been 300% more concerned as an org with landing sales/enticing people than actually delivering a well-polished product?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
celdon25 4y ago
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.
- belval 4y ago
  Users are allowed to "try again" when their post does not gain enough traction.
  - phreack 4y ago
    In fact, many times they're even asked to do so by moderators when they think it'd be a good idea.
    - celdon25 4y ago
      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.
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
        What's technically or morally wrong with using a VPN, again?
        celdon25 4y ago
        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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cortesoft 4y ago
So based on the comments, I don’t think this is intentional… but the site is currently displaying this error when I visit: > Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. >Try waiting a few minutes and reloading. >(Cannot access the database) Which I guess is kinda a short summary of what the article was actually about?
- manuelisimo 4y ago
  For a second I thought the Error page was intentional
- pdenton 4y ago
  It's strange though, the best software (including RDBMS) is free.
neilv 4y ago
Original URL currently offline. https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro/index.php/I_want_to_give_Oracle_money_but_I_can%27t https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro...
- tedk-42 4y ago
  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.
  - superdisk 4y ago
    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.
  - teh_klev 4y ago
    Sure, but no-one asked them if they'd like their article to be referenced on HN, Reddit etc then to be hugged to death.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      It was submitted here by the author.
      - teh_klev 4y ago
        I don't see anything in "superdisk"'s profile or in the comments that backs this up.
        Beltalowda 4y ago
        All submissions are from that domain, and "superdisk" is their username if you check their site.
sytelus 4y ago
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.
- estaseuropano 4y ago
  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.
089603973221 4y ago
aurora72 4y ago
For anyone interested in AWS's the so called free, the lowest tier: It's free for 12 months then it starts to cost 10 plus dollars a month.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > For anyone interested in AWS's the so called free, the lowest tier: It's free for 12 months then it starts to cost 10 plus dollars a month. AWS has both free-for-12-months and always-free quota (sometimes both, at different levels, for the same service.)
paletteOvO 4y ago
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.
pSYoniK 4y ago
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).
yashg 4y ago
I want to give ahrefs money but can't. India, RBI, credit card subscription rules.
Aachen 4y ago
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.
- Rerarom 4y ago
  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".
- oldsecondhand 4y ago
  Hungary doesn't have a credit score system either. You should ask around if Hungarian IBAN is accepted.
petesergeant 4y ago
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).
webmobdev 4y ago
The server seems down, read here - https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro/index.php/I_want_to_give_Oracle_money_but_I_can't https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro... 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-sign-up-and-create-a-free-ibm-cloud-account https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/138908/unable-to... . I wonder if this has something to do with both Oracle and IBM being B2B company?
perlwle 4y ago
Tried to sign up with credit card issued by Chinese Bank. Failed with 3 different cards(VISA or MASTERCARD). I gave up.

78 points by superdisk 4y ago

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.

lelanthran 4y ago
I remember using a SUN keyboard on a pizzabox back in the 90s. I remember at the time thinking it was unusually nice to type on. How does your one connect to your PC? Did you have to buy a special ps2->USB adaptor?
- donatj 4y ago
  It's USB, the last couple models of Sun keyboards were.

dotancohen 4y ago

> Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. > (Cannot access the database) Maybe they should try an Oracle database. Doesn't cost much. Lrf, guvf vf cbxvat sha ng gur vebal.

CaliforniaKarl 4y ago

I wonder what their credit card's customer support line said. When I've had similar declines, I've been able to get an explanation from them.

3np 4y ago
Most likely it was not declined by them but by Oracle/their payment processor.

sammy2244 4y ago

They wouldnt accept my Revolut (Visa) card either. I just gave up in the end

nineteen999 4y ago

Welcome to the current state of the art in web application development in 2022 - Web 1.5

nnx 4y ago

"but their compute pricing is just too tasty to ignore" (linking to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html https://www.oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html ) 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.

InvaderFizz 4y ago
Does anyone else beat $7/month/core for a non-shared ARM core? Because that is what Oracle is charging for non-reserved, on demand customers.
berns 4y ago
> definitely not lower than Digital Ocean 2 vcpu 8GB: DigitalOcean $ 60 with 4 TB transfer Oracle $ 25.75 with 10 TB transfer (DigitalOcean includes local ssd, but you don't want to use that.)
- trinovantes 4y ago
  At that price range, you may as well just get a dedicated from Hertzner with unlimited gigabit transfers

InvaderFizz 4y ago

They will reject any temporary card number for sure, I believe they also reject all prepaid cards and debit-as-credit based on others experiences. 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.

igetspam 4y ago
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.
- qwertox 4y ago
  You can use proxy cards in your day to day life. 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.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    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
    - ungamed 4y ago
      Especially as one is a 'once off' use, the other is billing on demand.
  - igetspam 4y ago

pretentious7 4y ago

I have also been having some rather inexplicable issues with paying oracle, it's really strange.

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
Have they not always been 300% more concerned as an org with landing sales/enticing people than actually delivering a well-polished product?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

celdon25 4y ago

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.

belval 4y ago
Users are allowed to "try again" when their post does not gain enough traction.
- phreack 4y ago
  In fact, many times they're even asked to do so by moderators when they think it'd be a good idea.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    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.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      What's technically or morally wrong with using a VPN, again?
      - celdon25 4y ago
        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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cortesoft 4y ago

So based on the comments, I don’t think this is intentional… but the site is currently displaying this error when I visit: > Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. >Try waiting a few minutes and reloading. >(Cannot access the database) Which I guess is kinda a short summary of what the article was actually about?

manuelisimo 4y ago
For a second I thought the Error page was intentional
pdenton 4y ago
It's strange though, the best software (including RDBMS) is free.

neilv 4y ago

Original URL currently offline. https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro/index.php/I_want_to_give_Oracle_money_but_I_can%27t https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro...

tedk-42 4y ago
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.
- superdisk 4y ago
  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.
- teh_klev 4y ago
  Sure, but no-one asked them if they'd like their article to be referenced on HN, Reddit etc then to be hugged to death.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    It was submitted here by the author.
    - teh_klev 4y ago
      I don't see anything in "superdisk"'s profile or in the comments that backs this up.
      - Beltalowda 4y ago
        All submissions are from that domain, and "superdisk" is their username if you check their site.

sytelus 4y ago

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.

estaseuropano 4y ago
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.

089603973221 4y ago

aurora72 4y ago

For anyone interested in AWS's the so called free, the lowest tier: It's free for 12 months then it starts to cost 10 plus dollars a month.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> For anyone interested in AWS's the so called free, the lowest tier: It's free for 12 months then it starts to cost 10 plus dollars a month. AWS has both free-for-12-months and always-free quota (sometimes both, at different levels, for the same service.)

paletteOvO 4y ago

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.

pSYoniK 4y ago

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).

yashg 4y ago

I want to give ahrefs money but can't. India, RBI, credit card subscription rules.

Aachen 4y ago

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.

Rerarom 4y ago
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".
oldsecondhand 4y ago
Hungary doesn't have a credit score system either. You should ask around if Hungarian IBAN is accepted.

petesergeant 4y ago

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).

webmobdev 4y ago

The server seems down, read here - https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro/index.php/I_want_to_give_Oracle_money_but_I_can't https://web.archive.org/web/20220414041010/https://nickfa.ro... 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-sign-up-and-create-a-free-ibm-cloud-account https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/138908/unable-to... . I wonder if this has something to do with both Oracle and IBM being B2B company?

perlwle 4y ago

Tried to sign up with credit card issued by Chinese Bank. Failed with 3 different cards(VISA or MASTERCARD). I gave up.