Was considering upgrading to premium, but I see you only accept paypal. I wanted some anonymity when using site but only accepting paypal which ties you directly to a bank account is not very anonymous. Had you accepted google checkout, then one could use Visa (perhaps prepaid one). Or better yet the acceptance of bitcoins.
paypal does not require a bank account and can accept cards (even prepaid ones I believe). We do not see any of the information that you provide paypal with.
What do you mean by details not going anywhere? Once a purchase is made to paypal to romulation.net, paypal could provide someone with all the identities of those using romulation.net If that is the case then it alleviates the paypal issue I identify above. Also looks like the romulation.net servers are location in USA which has some stringent laws on maintaining IP logs.
could, but won't. Doing so would destroy their business, since the entire point of paypal is protecting the privacy of people's information, particularly their financial information, not to mention the various laws around the world preventing them doing that. Google or Amazon could do exactly the same thing, but won't for the same reasons. We don't keep IP logs, and I'm not aware of any laws requiring us to. Just because our servers are located in the US does not mean we're US based.
I believe he means in case paypal is subpoenaed. In which case any payment processor would hand over information.
Correct, game backups are a grey area. A good amount of my Wii game discs are in good condition and ripping well for backups and wit verify is showing as good rip. But some are so damaged by kids/neighbors they will not even read, so hence the need to download ISO. I kinda figured your not US based but if its using a US server (IP 76.73.45.138 resolves to Denver, CO USA server of host company FDC Servers), then that server is bound to US laws which have recently been passed and dictate that all ISPs and server companies keep logs of IPs. Course, that will not effect me since I use a VPN service (not based in US so not keeping logs). I am curious if your not US based an FDC Servers has servers in EU that do not have log requiring laws, then why not have the site hosted on one of these servers. I am sure you must have your reasons. In summary, I will try the paypal account option via a cash visa card and see how that works. BTW, many privacy concerned VPN providers now offer bitcoins as payment option so not sure why comment was made that bitcoins are not very good. Also great site and thanks for the recent Wii ISOs uploaded.
Why avoid paypal specifically? the subpoena situation would have the same result regardless of who the payment processor is, and game backups is not a grey area at all. Making backups is legal, downloading them or sharing them is not. Pretty clear cut really. FDC cannot log anything on our server, it is completely under our control, they have no way of getting into it without us knowing. We host in the US because a large proportion of our visitors are on that side of the atlantic (geographical proximity theoretically results in better speeds, although it doesn't always turn out that way) and because hosting in the US, particularly high bandwidth hosting, is significantly cheaper than anywhere else. Besides, when it comes to FDC, they're hit or miss depending what datacentre you're in. Denver is a good datacentre, chicago isn't, and we have no idea what their european ones are like. Why take a chance on them being rubbish in addition to more expensive? We've had our share of rubbish hosts (including fdc chicago) and don't fancy going that route again.
