
DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region - CarlHoerberg
https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-our-london-region/
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benbristow
"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.

~~~
raiyu
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.

~~~
meritt
Why is mining in particular disallowed? Aren't you allocating a set amount of
CPU to a paying customer?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Just a guess: mining produces less than $5 per month of bitcoins, so it's
fairly strong evidence of a fraudulent credit card or hacked account.

~~~
meritt
Ah, if it's indeed related to fraud that's a fine reason generally.

I'm worried about a company restricting usage to resources which you have been
allocated, as I thought we were well past the problems of shared hosts with
the rise of virtual machines / linux containers.

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guillermovs
Softlayer also introduced a London region a few hours ago.
[http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/london-just-got-
cloudier%E2%8...](http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/london-just-got-
cloudier%E2%80%94lon02-live)

~~~
nly
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.

~~~
CSDude
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

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kintamanimatt
The 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!

~~~
nwh
At least one other region has had them for a while (Singapore I think).

~~~
IgorPartola
If by "a while" you mean less than a month:
[https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-
ipv6-su...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/announcing-ipv6-support-
in-singapore/).

I am a customer of DO's but I am not a happy one since I have to muck around
with 6in4 tunnels just to get this basic stuff working.

~~~
CarlHoerberg
Long time customers have had access to it since early May..
[https://assets.digitalocean.com/email/ipv6-grandfathered.htm...](https://assets.digitalocean.com/email/ipv6-grandfathered.html)

~~~
IgorPartola
So a small number of customers had IPv6 access in one of seven data centers
for just over two months. Sorry, but I don't see this as a big redeeming
correction (though it is factual).

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Osmium
Just 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?

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marcosscriven
One thing I wish were available with many of these US-based services is
billing in GBP.

~~~
raiyu
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$?

~~~
vertex-four
My bank will charge £1.50 plus a variable commission for paying in anything
but GBP.

~~~
jordanthoms
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).

~~~
fendale
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.

~~~
Osmium
> 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.

~~~
bryanlarsen
My impression was that the banks made a lot more money from the spread than
they did from the commission, so I kind of find that surprising. In Canada
it's easy to find commission-free cards. The spread is a hidden fee though, so
the banks have hiked that up several times.

~~~
gabemart
The commission-free withdrawals abroad were offered at the wholesale VISA
rate. Nationwide didn't take any vig.

Their "Select credit card" still offers EUR and USD purchases with no
surcharge and no vig.

~~~
fendale
I'm pretty sure the Halifax card I mentioned gives the Visa wholesale rate
too. I generally get same rate as quoted on FX sites anytime I've checked it.

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resca79
Digital Ocean is the promoter of low prices VPS, many thanks!

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ukgent__
your IPs are resolving to Netherlands :(

~~~
raiyu
Usually takes a bit of time for the registrars to update the Geo information.

