Suggestions for hosting providers from the Bitcoin-VPS.com team
Based on what we've seen, here are some tips for providing your
clients with a smoother experience and growing your business in a very
dynamic industry.
- Don't use BitPay or any other service with mandatory KYC for
all your customers. As we highlight on the front page, many
readers have complained BitPay requires a separate account and
extensive personal information from the customer in order to pay
for services from BitPay-using merchants. Commonly recommended
alternative payment providers include BTCPayServer, Coinify,
Coingate, and CoinPayments.net. Blockonomics.co and
accepting-bitcoin.org may also be worth looking at.
- Use BTCPayServer or another self-hosted solution
to accept payments. Politicians are currently trying to put a lot
of crazy limitations on crypto payment companies. Self-hosting is
the only way to be sure your payment provider doesn't suddenly do
something weird that hurts your business. Plus, self-hosted payment
providers offer better performance and a better user experience.
This is especially true if your self-hosted payment portal offers
Lightning Network payments. Our experience is that providers with
well-run in-house payment solutions are consistently more popular
with users than providers who rely on external payment
processing.
- Don't use Google reCaptchas. Google tries to optimise so that only
"suspicious" users have to solve their captchas. Unfortunately,
their algorithm often gets it wrong. This leads to legitimate,
paying customers spending 5 minutes or more solving captcha puzzle
after captcha puzzle just so they can sign up for your service. Not
surprisingly, people often give up and spend their money somewhere
else. Basic image captchas (generated by standard software) are
often "good enough" for most purposes. If you have to use a
3rd-party captcha service, use hCaptcha: their puzzles are far
quicker to solve (leading to more sales for you) and they actually
pay you for every captcha solution.
- Let Bitcoin filter out the fraud for you. With Bitcoin,
people pay in advance, and there are never any chargebacks. People
who want to steal money from you simply won't pay with Bitcoin.
This means most of the fraud detection algorithms you need to avoid
credit card fraud and high chargeback rates are irrelevant when a
user pays with Bitcoin. This also means you don't have to turn
away legitimate users because, for example, their IP address
doesn't match the country they gave at signup. Guess what? Most
people using VPNs will have an IP address in a country that's
different from where they're based. If they pay by Bitcoin, you
don't have to worry about the discrepancy and can happily accept
their business.
- Have an affiliate program. Getting new customers via
affiliate referrals is how Amazon got big, and it works wonderfully
in the hosting industry. For most management systems, enabling
affiliate links is just a matter of clicking a button to turn it
on. By the way: you don't have to worry about affiliate fraud on
Bitcoin orders. Since Bitcoin payments are as good as cash in hand,
Bitcoin purchases aren't subject to affiliate fraud the same way as
credit card or PayPal purchases are.
- Accept Lightning Network (LN) payments for your services...
either using an in-house solution or a payment processor. LN
payments clear instantly and have effectively zero fees, making
them ideal for someone who needs to quickly spin up a low-cost
service.
- Be up front about what you're good at and what kind of users
will be happiest hosting with you. The hosting world is
huge and there is only so much interest you will get by presenting
a bland and generic face to the world. If you have specific goals
or strengths then tell the world about it. Help those clients find
you who will be happiest using your services. If you have services
that you believe people coming from Bitcoin-VPS.com would be
particularly interested in, by all means, go ahead and create a
custom page that highlights those servers or plans. We will happily
set your link so it points to that page.
- Collect as little user information as necessary. Hosting
management control panels often ask the user to fill in many fields
(address, telephone number, etc) by default. If you actually need
to collect this information on your users, that's fine. However,
most hosting providers will never call their users or send them a
letter. In this case, not asking for this information will speed
the sign-up process (resulting in more sales) and show new
customers you respect their privacy. We live in an age where data
breaches are common... just about everyone you deal with will
have seen their personal information get breached, hacked, or
leaked because they trusted some company to keep it
confidential -- and that company failed. The less
information you ask for, the safer people feel.
- If you use IP-pinned login cookies, let users turn off IP
pinning. If your web control panel uses login cookies that
are locked to a particular IP address, the user will be logged out
when their IP address changes. For users on mobile, users with Tor
Browser, and similar cases, this results in absolute hell. The user
ends up being logged out constantly, sometimes as frequently as
each time they click a button on their control panel.