One-time PayPal for VPS renewal

[badrihippo]

Hi there,

My VPS expires in a few weeks, and because recurring payments aren't working from India I've been having to make one-time payments. My friend just sent the last payment of $21.60 on October 5th (two days ago); could you confirm that it's arrived and extend my subscription for another 6 months?

Server: hippo2.heliohost.org (also members.snipettemag.com)
IP: 64.71.156.101

PayPal payment ID: 81X39290UA608530J from Manasa Kashi (she also sent an email to Krydos, but perhaps it was the wrong one...)

***

More generally, it looks like recurring payments aren't going to happen for a while, due to changing government regulations in India and PayPal's glitches (incompetence?). Given that, would it be more convenient to do a large one-time payment (say, for 2-3 years) instead of every 6 months? (I know the automated system only supports 6-month increments, so it depends on how the manual override works; there was a glitch once where the VPS expired prematurely and was manually extended).

I'm fine either way, but longer-term payments might be less work for you on your end, so let me know which you prefer for next time onwards!

[Krydos]

Since this 6 month payment came from the same email address as the last one the system detected it automatically and updated the expiration date without any work on our part. I did get the email, but I forgot to ever reply. Sorry about that.

Regarding India and PayPal, you're definitely not the only one having problems. We've had tons of reports from our Indian users that they've been having trouble sending donations too. We're considering setting up a PayTM account to better serve India. That might work better than PayPal for you too.

[badrihippo]

On 10/7/2022 at 2:19 PM, Krydos said:

Since this 6 month payment came from the same email address as the last one the system detected it automatically and updated the expiration date without any work on our part. I did get the email, but I forgot to ever reply. Sorry about that.

Oh okay great! I guess this is a workable solution for now (unless I change the PayPal account I pay from).

On 10/7/2022 at 2:19 PM, Krydos said:

Regarding India and PayPal, you're definitely not the only one having problems. We've had tons of reports from our Indian users that they've been having trouble sending donations too. We're considering setting up a PayTM account to better serve India. That might work better than PayPal for you too.

Yes, PayTM would be great, if you can manage it! It's got good support in India (as does any app supporting India's Unified Payment Interface or UPI). Another potential option is PayU, which I personally use, and which has competent customer support staff who actually have the authority to make changes rather than stonewalling. I'm not sure if it works for people based outside India, but if PayTM doesn't work it's worth looking into.

(Customer service is a big problem here even with major companies; for example I contacted Western Union about activating my account dozens of times within the span of a month before giving up; they didn't seem to be able to review the documents they themselves had asked for and allow me to use their own platform. Anyway, that's something I won't go into now...)

[Krydos]

PayTM seems to be really anti-US. If I try to create an account from a US IP their site gives 403 errors for everything, but if I use a VPN to use an Indian IP everything works. You are also only allowed to create an account if you have a valid +91 phone number. All of the above makes me thing that PayTM only wants Indian companies using their service, so I'm afraid that if we even managed to make an account they might find out we're based in the US and would close our account and we'd lose our money. Not very promising.

Do you know if Payoneer works well for you in India?

[badrihippo]

Sorry for the late reply! I should check this forum more often. Ouch, PayTM really doesn't like other countries then. It is optimised for India so I guess the idea is only to support Indian businesses? PayU seems more international but since they're also India based it's likely they'll be the same. (I couldn't find any evidence to the contrary).

I've never used Payoneer, and their documentation about available payment methods seems quite opaque. They mention "linking" an account which is bad news for anyone from India since India no longer allows linking. But if you set up a test payment I'm willing to give it a try (if it goes through you can extend my VPS or something).

I was trying to research more on payment options, but unfortunately most people are talking about getting payments from the US to India, which is annoying. I guess Indians are more focused on getting US dollars than on paying for US services >.<

[Krydos]

10 minutes ago, badrihippo said:

I was trying to research more on payment options, but unfortunately most people are talking about getting payments from the US to India, which is annoying. I guess Indians are more focused on getting US dollars than on paying for US services >.<

Yeah, I'm no expert on Indian politics, but from my point of view it seems like your government is hell-bent on isolating itself from the rest of the world to prevent any rupees from going anywhere other than staying inside India. We can all see how well that has worked for North Korea.

[badrihippo]

Hi! In case this is helpful, I recently made successful payments with my international debit card. Putting notes here for reference, both for myself and if it helps you. TL;DR: Braintree might be worth a shot? (They're owned by PayPal, so whatever data you're giving them, they already have).

In the past few months, I've made payments from India at the following places:

• GoFundMe - gofundme.com
• Kobo US - us.kobobooks.com
• Mozilla - donate.mozilla.org
• Mailgun - a bill from mailgun.com

Note that this was with an international debit card. Local debit cards won't work, but at least my international one worked flawlessly. (It's still at a roadblock with Stripe and PayPal).

I tried to figure out what payment gateways they used for collecting my card details, and here's what I got:

• I couldn't make out what GoFundMe uses; in their privacy policy they say they use different processor depending on the country
• Kobo was similarly opaque but IIRC they use Citrus Pay (I placed an order with them yesterday)
• Mozilla uses Braintree (a PayPal company but evidently with better payment processing than PayPal itself)
• Mailgun uses something called "chargifypay.com", but when I try to load that page it redirects me to a complicated billing/SaaS provider called Maxio. Looks like there was a separate billing management service called Chargify that has now been bought over.

I was hoping for more details but that's unfortunately all I could find. If it's worth it, let me know and maybe I'll have a shot at writing to those companies and asking  them directly what payment processor they use.

[Krydos]

Thanks for the information. The Braintree thing might be promising.