alt Hacker NewsOne issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card
That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
Hetzner team if you are reading this, although I love email platform, is there any way that your support stops being AI (which annoyed me) but rather you can have an discord,matrix (preferred),telegram, heck IRC or even slack for what its worth where I can message the team if I wanted a custom solution on top of hetzner etc.
Fwiw, Upcloud provided support and heard me out even if I didnt share my credit card info so massive respects to them and I am sure that my experience with hetzner has always been positive (they responded to me once on hackernews which was peak) but maybe if they are reading this (then hello!) and yea, please hetzner I hope you change your contact page to be more suitable or hear my complaints as I like hetzner a lot too
Personally, I am starting to value contact support which I thought didn't matter a lot nowadays. It doesn't matter if its cheap or not but rather if I can talk to their team once about any product and see if I can match their terms of service and similar basically or other issues in general too.
Also Hetzner, another point, I would love to be able to write articles for you and get the 50$ (I will read it again to see if I can "write" according to the conditions but yea) and similar but once again I need a hetzner account which required credit card/debit card validation.
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> One issue in web hosting companies which I see is that to get support through ticket, you need a login page and you cannot complete the login process until you sign up with a credit card
> That literally annoyed me so much even on something like hetzner.
In one word: fraud. I've worked at a company similar to Hetzner, and the "add a credit card first" is the single most effective way to weed out 99% of abusers. People that will each up swaths of compute and mine crypto, ruining the service for everyone. Or hosting CSAM material. Or participating in botnets. Or sending spam. All those makes both the company AND the clients suffer.
You still get the occasional Pakistani bank that allows the emission of unlimited credit cards for fraudsters or the stolen cards (stripe goes a long way for this), but it simply makes the business bearable.
So yeah, we were not thrilled to enforce CC for signup. Believe it or not, even marketing or sales hated it, because it introduces friction in the signup tunnel.
As to re: logged in to open tickets, it is a necessity to avoid customer getting their account stolen. As a customer you receive fake "change your password now!" emails, as a company you receive fake "i've lost my password!" emails. That's the sad way the world is right now. Account theft for hosting providers is a real thing, because the stakes can be very very high.
Hi there, First, we are currently in the process of unifying our user interfaces, so it is helpful to get feedback like this. We do have an AI chatbot on our website because that tends to work well for most basic sales questions. Depending on the questions it gets, it will also steer users to other ways of reaching out to us. We have a contact form for Custom Solutions, and real humans answer those. https://www.hetzner.com/custom-solutions/ The same is true for general sales tickets that go here: https://www.hetzner.com/support-form/ You do not need to already be a customer, or give us your credit card info, to use those two forms. The reasons we steer our people who are already customers to use their account: 1) We can protect their data better there. 2) We can send the question to the right queue/team more easily. 3) We can quickly ask follow-up questions. The credit card information on new accounts is a step to prevent abuse and fraud. Depending on a user's location, once they create an account, they will likely have other billing options and they may change depending on their location. There are certain aspects of other platforms that make it a bit easier for companies to respond to customers/readers. We actually try really hard not to fish here on HN, and therefore only really respond if someone mentions us directly or if I see incorrect/misleading information. I imagine it is the same with other providers. --Katie