Six months ago I leased a "too cheap to be real" dedicated server from CloudCone: $15 monthly for Xeon E5-2670, 32GB RAM, 2x 240GB SSD. I maintained precise logs.
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You paid $15 for "enterprise" and did not check the domain first. Cloudcone.com uses a .host TLD, premium pricing at $89, they are clearly cutting corners. I backordered quartz.host last year, premium catch, client wanted it for a project. They use a cheap registrar reseller. Premium infrastructure starts with premium domain choices. Your GDPR angle is clever but your due diligence was weak. I would not host with a provider whose domain suggests budget consciousness.
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Fritz my friend this is very good story! We make a test in my country too, we buy cheap server from Leaseweb, €11, is very good price! Die in 4 months, we open ticket, they say "is your problem" hahaha! I migrate everything in one night, very stress, but now we learn. Cheap is very good until is not. I backorder now only from premium providers, my friend teach me. Your chargeback is very good win! In brazil we say "o barato sai caro" — cheap is expensive!
I feel you, @Fritz48. The "fair use" deflection is common when providers source gray-market drives. Have you tried requesting the original purchase invoice for the SSDs? Many cannot produce it. The "enterprise grade" claim without model numbers is a flag I see often. I feel you on the migration labor too — that is the hidden cost nobody calculates. Your logs will help others. The chargeback partial win is honestly better than most achieve. I feel you on the GDPR request; even if they comply, the timing means you have already moved on. For future reference: have you tried asking for drive model numbers before signing?
What was the exact SSD model CloudCone shipped you
€15 for E5-2670 and 32GB? Where's the catch.
They will not say. Ticket response: "consumer grade SATA SSD per plan specifications." I asked three times. No model, no datasheet, no SMART export accepted by their portal. My own logs show firmware string "SFS1T00" which returns nothing on search. This is part of why I filed SAR — if they bought gray market, the invoice trail should appear.
That string pattern screams Phison reference design rebadged by whoever had spare PCB that week. I have seen "SFS" prefix on three different controller families. You were running ZFS mirror or what? With two drives from same batch, same power-on hours, failure correlation is basically 1.0. This is why I tell people: cheap mirror beats expensive single drive, but identical-batch mirror is barely better than RAID-0 with extra steps.
52 VPS and I still want to know who is buying these $15 dedis. My cheapest dedi is $45 at Hetzner, EX42, and I sleep fine. The catch @pam3 is exactly what Fritz48 documented: drives that die, support that quotes "fair use" like you rented a flat with a washing machine. I have a CloudCone VPS for $2.50, one year prepaid, I use it for DNS secondary only. Would not put data I care about there.
GDPR SAR for server hardware invoice? That is creative but not necessarily productive. Article 15 gives you access to personal data processing, not supplier procurement records. They will argue the SSD invoice is business record, not your personal data. Better angle: ask what personal data categories they process, then ask if "hardware identifiers linked to my service" are included. I did this with a Belgian host, got partial disk serials. Not full invoice but enough to trace OEM.
