Question

Problems paying with paypal, Issues with Wordpress site crashing.

Hello Community who uses PayPal as a method of payment for DO. The issue with the drop down menu offering selects amount’s instead of allowing us to pay the specific amount we are being charged is, as quoted by Digital Oceans Platform Support Specialist Jarland, an “intentional Design”. In other words they are either A. to lazy and could not be bother listening to implement any of the other PayPal options, ie send payment, subscription. etc and are penalizing us for selecting this method. To digital ocean, Do your self a favor and just remove the ability to pay via PayPal altogether. After asking the purpose of this “Intentional Design” It was never clearly stated why. They just prefer to work against you as apposed to working with you.

Ever notice the /MO? making you assume your paying monthly. well a trip to your billing history will show you they are not billing you monthly, and if you did add a credit card, clearly they can take as much money as they want when they want.

Adding to the list of things they DO NOT DO for you. there is no protection against hacks and attacks. Ok i will state that the protection of your server is largely your responsibility. But for all you wordpress people out there with xml rpc brute force attacks. Yeah, there is now waf and thus no protection, i do not even know if they have ddos protection but i am assuming not if they cant block brute force attacks.

That is probably an “intentional design” as well?!

So it seems the drive of this company is to prevent and be reactive instead of listening to you and being pro active.

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Ryan Quinn • May 2, 2016

I am sorry you haven’t had a great experience. Let me take each of your points individually.

The issue with the drop down menu offering selects amount's instead of allowing us to pay the specific amount we are being charged is, as quoted by Digital Oceans Platform Support Specialist Jarland, an "intentional Design". In other words they are either A. to lazy and could not be bother listening to implement any of the other PayPal options, ie send payment, subscription. etc and are penalizing us for selecting this method. To digital ocean, Do your self a favor and just remove the ability to pay via PayPal altogether. After asking the purpose of this "Intentional Design" It was never clearly stated why. They just prefer to work against you as apposed to working with you.

We offer paypal as a pre-payment option which can be used to load funds to your account. Because of the nature of paypal, offering a post-payment option in this way would open us up to a ton of fraud. You mentioned a subscription. This is not a possibility since your billing is based on your usage, not on a flat monthly fee. Since we do not know what your billing amount will be before the end of each month we cannot offer a subscription option. (Doing this on a per-droplet basis would result in $0.01 charges anytime someone created and destroyed a small droplet quickly which would cost more in paypal fees to collect and would result in our just paying money to paypal. If you want to be able to spin up servers as they are needed, as our service offers than you either need to pre-load the funds you intend to use, or use a credit card so you can pay at the end of each month.

Ever notice the /MO? making you assume your paying monthly. well a trip to your billing history will show you they are not billing you monthly, and if you did add a credit card, clearly they can take as much money as they want when they want.

Again, Paypal is a prepayment option, you load funds, you use those funds. When using a credit card you are billed for your actual usage for the month on the first of each month. Our system processes these payments once a month, and only once a month on the 1st day.

Adding to the list of things they DO NOT DO for you. there is no protection against hacks and attacks. Ok i will state that the protection of your server is largely your responsibility. But for all you wordpress people out there with xml rpc brute force attacks. Yeah, there is now waf and thus no protection, i do not even know if they have ddos protection but i am assuming not if they cant block brute force attacks.

We are an unmanaged provider. This gives you complete control over your servers but with that control comes responsibility. We are aware of the xmlrpc attacks hitting wordpress which is why we updated the image a while back to include a built in way to block those requests. Because some of the most popular WordPress plugins require xmlrpc.php we cannot enable this by default without breaking the installation for a lot of people so we made it easy to enable yourself by running:

a2enconf block-xmlrpc
service apache2 restart

This is a simple configuration file you can enable which prevents access to xmlrpc.php.