Change Country Restriction rules

[killergabriel22]

Good day.
I'm a former customer (old username: sashabd; site: belladonna.elementfx.com - signed up in July 2011, CLOSED in April 2012) trying to sign up for a new free site...but I can't. Every time I try to sign up for free hosting, I get the message We have disabled registrations from your country of origin due to continued abuse....which I think is totally unfair.

To be more precise, what's unfair is your Country Restriction: you're practically saying that only people who live in 8 out of 196 nations can sign up for your services and all the other will never qualify, simply due to where they were born. It doesn't matter if you put of take off nations; many people - some might even be former customers like me - are seen as being on an lower lever because of the country they live in.
To me, this is pure, raw discrimination, and it shouldn't even exist.

I fully understand the abuse issues, but cutting off the 95% of the world is not a valid solution; it's a huge loss, on the contrary, because (to make a practical example) 50 people out of 150 from the blackisted nations who try the free service could decide to upgrade to Premium Hosting...and that's lots of money going somewhere else!

Anyway. It's your policy, your choice, whatever you wanna call it.
I'm surely bringing my site (and my eventual money) somewhere else.

 

[Skizzerz]

Our internal statistics disprove your points. The countries we have blacklisted formed the vast majority of abuse due to lax internet laws regarding piracy, etc. which we cannot allow on our servers since anyone hosting with a US-based company with US-based servers must follow US laws. This abuse put a strain on server resources (in the case of scripts such as udp flooders or rapidleech), got our servers blacklisted on more than one occasion with multiple email service providers due to spam emails (which also hurts legitimate users trying to send out emails), were often the users that opened the most support tickets for the stupidest reasons (putting a strain on our support staff), and never upgraded. That last part in particular is where you are wrong -- if 33% of users from a country upgraded, then that country would likely be on the whitelist unless there were serious abuse issues with them. In reality, of the countries not on the whitelist, the upgrade rate is maybe 0.1%. Maybe. Usually it's exactly 0%. We get very little to no money whatsoever from the vast majority of blacklisted countries, so it doesn't make sense to continue allowing service to them when most of what they do is abuse.

We occasionally update our country list (as we did previously), and it may change again in the future. Which countries are on the list and which are not is not up for debate or discussion. I replied to this thread giving some insight on why we blacklist countries, not to open a discussion on this policy. As such, I am closing this thread.