Major providers

All major cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud) require a credit card or equivalent identity-bound payment before approving an account. They also operate abuse and law-enforcement teams that respond to takedown requests quickly, which makes them a poor fit for any host the target ever sees.

The majors are still useful in two narrow cases:

  • The engagement contract explicitly permits cloud-of-record infrastructure. Some red team scopes prefer this for billing and audit trail reasons.

  • The infrastructure is on the management side only and never reaches the target’s network. Even then, the billing identity is a permanent link.

For anything that talks to the target, prefer the alternative providers that accept anonymous payments.

Resources