New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
Is 2checkout something? @jack started using this (few months back already) instead of direct paypal payments (It was you right?).
Maybe you could only accept bitcoin payments, since it can't be chargebacked/disputed.
sigh
Most banks issue a debit card that is a Visa or MasterCard. I guess in some countries that doesn't happen.
This is the best offer i've come across. I just hate when people abuse others' kindness like this
I am not sure which way to go about it, I will think of something.
This whole situation sadly is not uncommon, I just wanted to highlight a extreme example, I fully understand that some hosts are very unfair when it comes to things like refunds as if putting no refunds in your terms gives you god like rights and in some cases charge backs are justified.
It would be nice to think that people will read this and consider what they would do when dealing with a human face to face instead of hiding behind a computer screen in future but I know it is naive to think that will ever happen
Look what happened the first time I posted this offer: http://www.lowendnetwork.com/discussion/8446/inception-hosting-usauknetherlandsgermany-load-of-offers-starting-at-3.00-pyear-xen#Item_85 people could not give a shit about the correct protocols and just try to force things to go their own way and when it does not the foot stamping starts.
In the Netherlands (and several other European countries, as far as I know), all you get by default with a bank account is a debit card (Maestro). You can use it to withdraw money from an ATM or use payment terminals, but you can't use it for online payments without using the ebanking gateway of your bank (in the Netherlands, these gateways for all major banks are combined into 'iDeal'). The particular bank I use hands out a small USB crypto-calculator that you insert your bank card into, enter your PIN, and hit a button to confirm the transaction.
Long story short, a card number won't get you anywhere if your bank gives you a non-Visa/Mastercard ATM card.
@AnthonySmith My suggestions are as follows:
As this is to be a community project I suggest have it be manual activation.
Make it so you must sign-up for the forum and Validate through PM before even giving them the link for sign-up. Get some guys (you trust) from the community to vet the new customers (for free or in trade for some type of service perk) before they even get a sign-up link (to save you the labor overhead). Maybe ask for some information about what they would use it for and how they plan to give back to the community. If they are unable to provide this information or seem in any way shady, just refuse to give them a sign-up link.
Phone validation of accounts:
Include that on sign-up you will be called in order to verify your identity for any new customers which are not already a customer of yours. Purchase either a cheap VOIP account somewhere or purchase a small amount of phone credit from Skype or similar and ask a few people on the community board to volunteer an hour a day or so to call and verify new customers (for free or in trade for some type of service perk). Most calls should be very quick and only cost you 1-2 minutes of call time, so although the initial investment into the calling credit may be a bit high, at least you would know you have real customers, and those wanting to scam and make multiple accounts would be quickly noticed as they have the same phone number. Most people are not gonna get another phone number just to scam a 3 euro service.
In short, involve the community a little bit and have people give back in order to save you some of these stresses. I think you are already doing us a favor by doing this project at such a low cost to us and taking a loss on it overall, there is no reason the community can't give back some time and help out.
If you end up needing some help for this, let me know, I am sure I could find a bit of time everyday to give a hand.
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Why just not make that plan non-commissonable from an affiliate POV?
Just block China. I've seen enough abuse from China to say this is my solution.
Can I extend that one theoretical step further? Maybe turn it into a contest of some kind - then you have people pitching their ideas to you and you get to choose your clients - instead of always trying to get them to choose you! People will fight for the right to give you their money
Meanwhile, if you do this all very publicly, the hype and exposure that could create will only help get your name out there. Hopefully, that will end your troubles with the community project, turning it instead into a advertising cash-cow, and net you more signups for the profitable packages.
I get a client order a server from me and they paid $24 for 3 month. I give them the server info.after day or two I get a email from them.couple hour later I get a claim from PayPal and I lost the claim after that I shutdown the server.after I shutdown the server I get a support ticket saying they can't connect to the server.I give them reason why
Sounds like a hacked PayPal.
When I get the message it a rude message and I never run a dating website
I'm absolutely disgusted by some people, honestly, It's like people who sign up to 000webhost then refer people, you get loads for referring people, something like $5/person and you can cash out after $50. But it's always done maliciously.
It'd be nice to see this user banned from LET, if he's actually around here, there's certain clientelle you really don't want to mix with, even on a relaxed discussion board.
Onto chinese clients..
We've currently got lots of Chinese clients, they've flocked out 128MB plans, I have clue what they're using it for, however we reallocated an IP the other day and forgot to change the A record, tried accessing the A record earlier, chinese LAMP stack running.
None of them use excessive bandwidth like you'd expect from cheap VM clients, so I'm really confuzzled.
No Abuse reports so far either. \o\ /o/
...this is so important in business. Not every customer is right, or a good fit, or worth your time.
Maybe, just maybe, they are legitimate consumers?!
VPN
>
Possibly, but the unfortunate stereotypical <$1/m plan tends to get the most abuse, and with an influx of orders from the same link, from some random chinese forum, it's not hard to assume it's either a nice guy spreading a great deal or a shady guy spreading the next 'abuse n sink'.
@concerto49
That's what I thought, alot of them have requested Tun/Tap and PPTP, and we can see it being enabled through SolusVM, so I assume that's their usage, but with none of them breaking 10% of their allowance in a fortnight, it's suprising, I burn through about 10GB/day with all my activity online.
sorry for my ignorance. What is the story with affiliate links getting profit of 15% x 3$ per YEAR.
@goexodus
Think about it, if he backlinks that to some chinese forum, which lap up $1/month offers, think about it.
$.45 PER client PER year affiliate.
100 signups isn't exactly going to be hard with a deal costing $0.25/month.
If he was to somehow automate signups to the billing portal, it's not going to take long before overnight he's raking in account credit which he'll attempt to cash out or spend on other services there.
I bet OP is making a loss on just the IP's after trans. fees.
I was thinking about being nice like Anthony Smith and offering something like what he's doing.
Now I don't think I'll bother.
Not sure if it was just me, but I did get a MaxMind call when I signed up..
There does need to be another form of verification, I agree.
Chinese clients getting VPN from Dallas doesn't make a lot of sense. But yeah, a lot of them does.
We only have 100GB here (personal home connection).
Most Chinese clients buy it from New York. Don't ask me why.
it's mostly likely because a lot of hosts on the west coast are already blacklisted by GFW, coupled with ignorance
I think it's VPN.
VPN for blocked sites for example, it doesn't have to be high traffic profile, but then again it could be VPN for evil deeds, and remain low traffic profile...
Hmm... ...the only way to know for sure is to tap on the interface, but then would it be the right thing to do? As far as You don't disclose that info to third parties and don't abuse it it might be okay, if it's added somehow in the ToS, but still... Not so sure about this one.
At any rate, i guess You'll know for sure if someone contacts You regarding abuse coming from such IP, but that event might not happen even if the IP's have been abused.
At the end, i think VPN is basically meant to primarily connect one or more networks and access data within the network(s), usage primarily as an "anonymizer" cold be still generally regarded as abuse.
I feel your pain brother. Some days I'm about ready to manually activate all orders. I've started checking every IP at signup and if they pass fraud detection through a VPN, I'll rate limit all of their traffic and give them a couple hours at most to explain themselves. Plenty of legit reasons to want to be anonymous, none of which I've encountered by someone who tried to slip past fraud detection rather than opening communication.
I'm growing tired of the abuse and I haven't been in this game quite as long. I can imagine it takes quite a toll over time.
What's really fun is when the abusers don't use a vpn. Boy do they get scared when I threaten to call their mothers.
MY TIME HAS COME.
Now you all know why we manually approve all orders and keep strict guidelines on signups.
I'm fairly sure almost a year ago I made a comment that it wouldn't be long before others start doing manual approvals of some sort.
I give it a bit longer before most of you, you know, write your own TOS instead of using some generic one you found on some site. Aldryic spends a lot of time improving on our TOS and rolls updates out every 3 - 6 months.
Francisco