The someone else's computer is not the problem. Most of us take someone else's plane (or more climate-friendly train) and stay at someone else's hotel.
The problem is that customer "service" is handled by algorithms with no chance to reach competent humans who have the power to make reasonable decisions.
Cloud providers have a tough business model. The instant you use their compute resource, it's gone forever. But they bill you post-usage, and you can dispute the charges for a very long time. And, there are thousands of simple shell scripts that convert CPU time to cash. All of this makes it very easy to farm cloud providers for money. Not very much money, but free money doesn't have to be efficient.
For work, I run a cloud service like this, and we do indeed have this kind of fraud. Every stolen credit card number under the sun has signed up for an account. People create thousands of emails (and brand new domains) to get free trials. And, when our systems identify them and we shut them down, they whine in all possible support forums. I don't think we've ever made a mistake, but that is likely due to the small scale of our operation.
The only thing that keeps me sane is the extremely poor opsec of the fraudsters. They have pools of thousands of compromised IPs they're using for the command-and-control infrastructure that they install, but they often mistakenly use the same destination crypto wallet (they have a little LD_PRELOAD script they install to try to prevent us from seeing this, but it doesn't work if you don't load dynamic libraries to read the process table), or use a predictable naming scheme, or taint accounts by accessing a few of them from the same IP. (I have a graph that connects the accounts through things like IP address, so this is often the fatal screwup for thousands of accounts all at once.)
I imagine that Digital Ocean has this same problem, but at a million times the volume. So, there are going to be mistakes. It's intrinsically difficult to establish trust at these small scales. DO probably feels pretty uncomfortable giving someone a bunch of compute resources when they haven't even tried billing the credit card. You would feel pretty uncomfortable paying up front. So this is where we land, sometimes you look like fraud and get killed with fire. (As you get bigger, you'll have weekly meetings with your cloud provider, and they probably won't shut you down automatically. But at that small scale, it's tough for everyone!)
That really doesn't help the honest small customer. I want to buy something, pay the couple of bucks it costs and reliably get the service for my money. If I'd have to pay the couple of bucks a month in advance I would happily do it.
Yeah, being the honest small customer is tough. I find things like "pre-pay" or "use some third-party ID verification service" or "talk to sales" kind of off-putting, but honestly there aren't a lot of great options. (We went with the "talk to sales" route.)
Talk to sales makes no sense in the case of small customers. The sales person costs them more in a hour than I want to pay for my service for a whole month.
That's just not a great analogy because I don't need a hotel for 5 years or a train forever. When you don't own it, and especially when it's a large org, you don't have much leverage when they want to change the terms.
I'm just not interested in the "you will own nothing and like it" society. I don't trust the giant corporations and landlords to do the right thing. So, I own a house, a car, and my data.
Short term, like an Uber (or a plane) it's fine, but it's not a long-term solution unless or until I can rely more.
Giant corporations are certainly a problem, because it means oligopolies if not monopolies. Like Google, Facebook, Amazon in certain areas.
For cloud services to small customers there is luckily still a bit of choice. Unfortunately I don't see that any of them would really be better if things go wrong for some reason or another. Well, if you pay them less than a hourly salary for a whole month, customer service is not really an economic option.
Comments
The someone else's computer is not the problem. Most of us take someone else's plane (or more climate-friendly train) and stay at someone else's hotel.
The problem is that customer "service" is handled by algorithms with no chance to reach competent humans who have the power to make reasonable decisions.
Cloud providers have a tough business model. The instant you use their compute resource, it's gone forever. But they bill you post-usage, and you can dispute the charges for a very long time. And, there are thousands of simple shell scripts that convert CPU time to cash. All of this makes it very easy to farm cloud providers for money. Not very much money, but free money doesn't have to be efficient.
For work, I run a cloud service like this, and we do indeed have this kind of fraud. Every stolen credit card number under the sun has signed up for an account. People create thousands of emails (and brand new domains) to get free trials. And, when our systems identify them and we shut them down, they whine in all possible support forums. I don't think we've ever made a mistake, but that is likely due to the small scale of our operation.
The only thing that keeps me sane is the extremely poor opsec of the fraudsters. They have pools of thousands of compromised IPs they're using for the command-and-control infrastructure that they install, but they often mistakenly use the same destination crypto wallet (they have a little LD_PRELOAD script they install to try to prevent us from seeing this, but it doesn't work if you don't load dynamic libraries to read the process table), or use a predictable naming scheme, or taint accounts by accessing a few of them from the same IP. (I have a graph that connects the accounts through things like IP address, so this is often the fatal screwup for thousands of accounts all at once.)
I imagine that Digital Ocean has this same problem, but at a million times the volume. So, there are going to be mistakes. It's intrinsically difficult to establish trust at these small scales. DO probably feels pretty uncomfortable giving someone a bunch of compute resources when they haven't even tried billing the credit card. You would feel pretty uncomfortable paying up front. So this is where we land, sometimes you look like fraud and get killed with fire. (As you get bigger, you'll have weekly meetings with your cloud provider, and they probably won't shut you down automatically. But at that small scale, it's tough for everyone!)
That really doesn't help the honest small customer. I want to buy something, pay the couple of bucks it costs and reliably get the service for my money. If I'd have to pay the couple of bucks a month in advance I would happily do it.
Yeah, being the honest small customer is tough. I find things like "pre-pay" or "use some third-party ID verification service" or "talk to sales" kind of off-putting, but honestly there aren't a lot of great options. (We went with the "talk to sales" route.)
Talk to sales makes no sense in the case of small customers. The sales person costs them more in a hour than I want to pay for my service for a whole month.
That's just not a great analogy because I don't need a hotel for 5 years or a train forever. When you don't own it, and especially when it's a large org, you don't have much leverage when they want to change the terms. I'm just not interested in the "you will own nothing and like it" society. I don't trust the giant corporations and landlords to do the right thing. So, I own a house, a car, and my data. Short term, like an Uber (or a plane) it's fine, but it's not a long-term solution unless or until I can rely more.
Giant corporations are certainly a problem, because it means oligopolies if not monopolies. Like Google, Facebook, Amazon in certain areas.
For cloud services to small customers there is luckily still a bit of choice. Unfortunately I don't see that any of them would really be better if things go wrong for some reason or another. Well, if you pay them less than a hourly salary for a whole month, customer service is not really an economic option.
Sooner or later cost cutting becomes a management obsession and quality of service deteriorates - especially with monopolies.