My partner and I have been discussing the use of an automated sign up and account creation script.

I like the idea of having the proccess automated.

My partner is concerned about fraudulant sign ups and thinks it would help to verify each one.

I would like some feedback about your experiences, please.





ohh, I was not sure if this should be posted here or in "Running a Hosting Business". Since it is about a script I put it here.

Do not do automated signups. It is one giant headache. You can manually verify the vast majority of your orders in under 5 minutes and it will save your _ _ _ eventually. Spammers and phishers look for people who offer automated signups.

I completely agree with what was said above.

You may think that if you use automated account creation you can quickly look into the account manually after sign up (within 24hrs) but spammers can send out 1000's of emails in minutes.

If I'm looking for a hosting company and I see a hosting company providing auto accounts, I move on. I do this because its only a matter of time till that virtual server "I" may be on will also be where Mr. Spammer is on and run a greater risk at getting "our" IP blacklisted!

:uzi: :spam:

I totally agree with the responses above. We manually validate every customer with a telephone call for verification (in adition to our other validation techniques). Also, the customer appreciates the call... :)

A few minutes to validate will save you countless headaches and man hours resolving the various issues that an automatic signup could bring.

If your going to have staff on 24/7 you could have automated signups with someone checking signups regually.


Best of both worlds then, someone checking the orders (to keep spammers away) but instant actvation for clients.

You can manually verify the vast majority of your orders in under 5 minutes and it will save your _ _ _ eventually.


What type of verification you do use? I saw the phone call listed above. What do you use to decide whether to approve the account or not.


We currently have a sign up form that makes a paypal subscription and emails us their info. my partner gets a page and we can start the proccess. Last year we got a sign up and went through the steps to set up the account. 2 days latter we got an email from our hosting provider(we have a shared reseller account) It said that the account started sending large numbers of emails and was dissabled. We email the client and told them it was agianst our policy and we terminated the account.

How were we to aviod this in the future?? What is the verification proccess used??

Btw, Thanks for your comments. I find this fourm very helpful.

Originally posted by sbishop
How were we to aviod this in the future?? What is the verification proccess used??You can't completely stop this and nothing is fool proof. However, if you offered "auto accounts" you will open your self up to more fraud.

Look at it like this, locking you car when you go into the store, while this won't prevent a theif stealing your car, it does cut down on a lot of riff-raff....and that is something the internet has lots of :hammer:

Many auto-creation scripts also work with FraudGate which can help out a great deal.

What I've done is just mod my auto script so it doesn't auto create the user in other words. It creates the account but with a random password, then when a actual human accepts the account it than sends out the password in email format to that user.

We verify IP location, zip code, area code. If any of those look suspicious we will verify several other pieces of information.

This does not mean that account creation is a manual process. All we need to do is click a few buttons in ModernBill after the verification and the account is created and the welcome email sent.

Customer comes first.

How would you feel that when you bought a $3.95 hosting account you get a phone call from the president of the company welcoming to his company and letting you know that they are happy to have your business?

I think that this marketing tool that have been forgotten. That's why I'm beating my competition. jejejeje.

I would feel that i should have signup with another company, where President doesn't have time to call each $3.95 customer or $39.50 or even $395.00. Personally welcoming customers is not a presidents job, unless that President is also a janitor among other things that he does in the company.

About automation, it will depend on size of your business. It costs money to automate validation of your signups properly. But if your company is small it may be less expensive to do it manually for some time.

you can go for a semi-automated solution. That way it shall save you bucks and headaches. do the entire automation and keep the welcome email manual. Send login details only after verification