ultra5

Read ToS once, in 2019. Nothing since. Time is money.

Porto here. I use OVHcloud VPS in Gravelines, monthly, no discount. The ping from Portugal is 35ms, good enough. I tried the annual once, 2019, same story as everyone, 30% use, guilt, renewal. Never again.

The discount is a loan you take from your future discipline. Most of us have bad credit.

htt...

In Portugal we get ripped on transit costs compared to Germany. I run a small Proxmox cluster at home, nload for quick checks, vnstat for the long view.

Contabo's London DC ping is worse from Porto than their Nuremberg one. Geography is weird.

I am still running 8x3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 in RAIDZ2. Rebuild takes 26 hours. Not production, just media and ISO archive. Would cost me 800 EUR to replace with SSDs for no user-facing benefit. The platters spin, the Plex works, my wallet stays closed.

Vultr works. I have two instances in Amsterdam, €5.50 each, one runs my mail server. No surprises in two years. Their control panel actually has a "disable auto-renew" toggle that stays disabled.

In Portugal we use Sapo for email since forever but for domains I go with Porkbun or Cloudflare. Cloudflare registrar has no markup, very clean.

Larry, if you abandon, transfer the DNS to Cloudflare before you let it expire. Easier to manage.