"We will need you to send us a high quality scan of a government ID or passport in order to verify your account. Please send the picture, or a link of the picture, to:"
No thanks.
DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#32"We will need you to send us a high quality scan of a government ID or passport in order to verify your account. Please send the picture, or a link of the picture, to:" No thanks.
Unfortunately we deal with a large amount of abusive and fraudulent signups which leads to a bunch of abuse on the network such as mining, port scanning, and flooding. We do everything we can to filter out abuse automatically and then determine whether or not a customer is legitimate outside of that but unfortunately that information isn't always available or conclusive.
We'd love to hear suggestion on how we can improve that without resorting to requesting an ID because obviously that isn't something that's ideal.
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#33The biggest thing that should be celebrated about this announcement is the availability of IPv6 addresses. Hopefully the rest of the regions will be enabled soon too!
We are in the process of opening up in datacenters in NYC and AMS which will also feature IPv6 and then we'll be retrofitting the remaining datacenters for that.
Thanks!
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is VAT to pay and these companies are required to register for VAT and charge it I believe. Eg see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110202144320/htt...
That doc is dated 2003 so I guess the regs have changed (and there have been some pretty major changes recently like CA2006 and FA2011). I certainly don't get VAT invoices from the US suppliers I use (linode and digital ocean for example). Edit: The 4th paragraph here seems to settle it: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vatpossmanual/vatposs14300.ht... The reverse charge mechanism places the burden for accounting for V…
I have a more up-to date reference
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/register/when-to-register.h...
I do get them from pingdom, and AWS. I do not get them from Mailchimp or hostgator.
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ouch. Seems credit cards out of the US are nowhere near as good, common there to have no foreign transaction fees (apart from probably some margin on the exchange rate).
If you shop around in the UK for a credit card, you will get one with zero fees and an excellent exchange rate on foreign currency transactions. I use the Halifax Clarity card and I believe The Nationwide and the Post Office do a good card too. I'd never use a Debit Card for foreign currency transactions though, they always seem to have fees involved.
> I'd never use a Debit Card for foreign currency transactions though, they always seem to have fees involved.
Nationwide used to have commission-free cash withdrawals on their debit cards abroad, but I think it was abused by people who had second homes in other countries so withdrawn a year or two ago. I believe they still offer a commission-free credit card though.
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#36Softlayer also introduced a London region a few hours ago. http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/london-just-got-cloudier%E2%8...
And cheaper if you use a lot of bandwidth. They throw in 5 TB of outbound with their cheapest VPS. ~$28/mo compared to $70 with DO.
But if you don't, it is pretty expensive:
80$/mo DO: 8GB RAM, 4 Core, 80GB disk, 5TB
163$/mo Softlayer: 8GB RAM, 4 Core, 100GB storage, 5TB
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most good US cards don't charge an extra fee for non-USD transactions.
They do, they just hide it in the applied exchange rate.
This is not true. All Mastercard and Visa cards charge a rate that is specified my Mastercard and Visa on a daily basis. I've been tracking this rate for a few months now, and it's consistently been awfully close to the rate I find on xe.com.
The CARD Act of 2009 mandated that credit card issuing companies clearly describe the fees associated with foreign transactions.
Visa/Mastercard charge a cross border origination fee of 0.80%. However many credit cards (all cards by Captial One for example) waive this fee, and do not charge any fee of their on on top of this.
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doc is dated 2003 so I guess the regs have changed (and there have been some pretty major changes recently like CA2006 and FA2011). I certainly don't get VAT invoices from the US suppliers I use (linode and digital ocean for example). Edit: The 4th paragraph here seems to settle it: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vatpossmanual/vatposs14300.ht... The reverse charge mechanism places the burden for accounting for V…
I have a more up-to date reference http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/register/when-to-register.h... I do get them from pingdom, and AWS. I do not get them from Mailchimp or hostgator.
Could be because Pingdom is a Swedish company and AWS is Amazon, which has a presence in Europe?
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#39Just did a quick test from London, comparing lon1 to ams2. Pleasant increase in speeds (25 MB/s up, 20 MB/s down vs. 15 MB/s each way for ams2, though these fluctuate) and a nice decrease in ping (3.5 ms vs 8 ms). Nice to see.
Not sure what the legal/regulatory differences are for hosting in London compared to elsewhere?
Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the moment all of our billing across all of our geographies is done in US dollars, which given the exchange rate of the UK and EU is usually within your favor. Is there a conversion charge that your credit card company levies on you for paying in US$?
I'm not speaking for Marco, but another issue with dollars is tax accounts (and especially VAT accounts) for British companies have to be in pounds, so there's overhead in doing the conversions, tracking the exchange losses/gains, etc. We also have to reverse charge the VAT on those transactions as well (though I'd be surprised if the majority of business owners know they have to do that). About 90% of my company's e…
Can't you just use the monthly tables published by HMRC for the exchange rate (IIRC, packages like Xero do this automatically for you?). For the reverse charge, wouldn't that always just balance out i.e. input and output tax are always the same?