[occultist_throw]

Evidently for their trials, they have bots that scan the VMs and kill machines running cryptocurrency software. Just read a bit of threads on google, reddit about this.

Possibly, you can run it on paid machines - but why would you? They charge you more for a machine/hour than you can make cryptocurrency/hr.

[stephengillie]

If the free tier isn't funded by conversions, then it's only really valuable as a marketing tool.

This is why hosts are often judicious with the free hosting tier - even with address verification and capchas, 60% of the free tier is phishing hosts using a stolen identity and credit card. About 20% are Ebay snipers running shoe-bots, or crypto-miners, begging for bare metal for the response times or hardware, respectively. Another 18% are technology generalists who might cobble together a 2004-era blog hosting service, to engorge their inner nerd - mostly harmless, might not patch something, but will never convert.

For the first 2 groups - once the credit is up (or gets flagged for spam/phishing), the account gets flipped. The scammer uses new email and maybe a new credit card, and migrates their activities. Darknet forums (and probably some subreddits) have lists of providers and how to work the free tier. I expect software to auto-balance between multiple free-tier accounts on multiple cloud providers exists; I've debated scripting the API calls in Powershell in a few weekends.

[pavel_lishin]

What's a shoe-bot?