18 months on a 'lifetime deal' host

18 months on Contabo "lifetime deal"

I purchased their unlimited reseller package in August 2024 for €89 one-time. I have kept quarterly benchmarks since day one because I suspected this model was unsustainable under EU consumer protection frameworks.

Q3 2024: 340ms TTFB, 99.2% uptime
Q4 2024: 410ms TTFB, 98.7% uptime
Q1 2025: 680ms TTFB, 96.1% uptime
Q2 2025: 1.2s TTFB, 91.4% uptime
Q3 2025: 2.8s TTFB, 87.3% uptime

I raised a ticket in January 2025 about performance. They cited "increased platform demand." No mention of acquisition.

Yesterday I received notice that my "legacy plan" is being migrated to a new structure with 10GB storage cap and monthly bandwidth limits. The terms I agreed to in 2024 have apparently been "superseded."

I am documenting everything. This may constitute unfair commercial practices under Directive 2005/29/EC. Article 13 flashbacks indeed.

Has anyone else tracked this degradation systematically? I want to build a proper evidence base before national consumer authority complaint.

This is where transparency breaks down. At my day job we run blameless postmortems for any vendor communication gap exceeding 48 hours. This reeks of deliberate opacity.

I've seen this pattern before with hosting consolidation. Brands get absorbed, terms get modified silently a few months in, and existing customers are the last to hear. Your error budget for this "lifetime" is clearly exhausted. I would treat this as a full outage and migrate with prejudice.