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The checkout issue is real. I tried to upgrade a VPS in Nuremberg on 2025-08-12, payment processed, no provisioning. Ticket #458291. Six days, no reply. I opened a second ticket referencing the first. Auto-closed as duplicate.
This is the straight path: they are underwater. Flash sale is not marketing, it is cashflow.
This aligns with my observations. I have now logged 73 days of the «24 hour» banner. I do not allege insolvency — I have no evidence — but the pattern of deferred maintenance, non-response to tickets, and perpetual discounting is consistent with liquidity stress.
I have also noted their cookie banner now requests consent for «partners» without naming them, which fails Article 13 GDPR. I will add this to my documentation.
73 days? I thought we were at 47. Did I miss a month?
My solar rig in Alentejo loses track of time sometimes, but this is impressive even by my standards.
The 73 days is from my own first observation on 2025-06-15, not from prague1983's July start. Two independent trackers. The sale may predate all of us.
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Same thing here in Brazil with local host, the «limited time» never end. But Contabo has datacenter in Singapore per the list, I think about try them for my selfhost migration. The price in euro is bad for real now but still cheap — https://contabo.com/en/vps/
The timer reset is normal, I see in Locaweb too.
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Normal não é bom, irmão. I remember when Real host was cheap and honest about being cheap. Now everything is this fake urgency.
I used Contabo last year, network to São Paulo was fine, to Curitiba not so much. But for the price, saudades do Real host barato indeed.
DNS propagation takes less time than this sale. I've had A records stale for 48 hours and thought that was eternal.
Contabo's Sydney DC is real though, I ping it from Melbourne: 14ms stable. The sale banner loads from Cloudflare in 23ms. The countdown JavaScript: 0ms, because it's client-side fiction.
It's always DNS. Except when it's JavaScript.
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Detroit perspective: I run a Proxmox cluster on decommissioned Dell R720s I got from a school auction. $80 total, 128GB RAM. My «flash sale» was a guy on Craigslist who said «come today only» and still had the servers three weeks later.
The countdown timer is the same psychology. Urgency that isn't urgent. I respect Contabo for being obvious about it. At least you know.
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Belgian perspective: our Market Practices Act (Wet handelspraktijken / Loi sur les pratiques du commerce) transposes the same EU Directive 2005/29/EC. The eternal countdown is misleading under Article VI.97 of our Economic Law Code. I have seen the FPS Economy act on smaller cases.
The difference: Germany has active Verbraucherzentralen. Belgium has... forms. Many forms.
I will file one anyway. Regulation is infrastructure.
DAY 51 update. They changed the GIF. Still blinking, still «24 HOUR FLASH SALE», but the font is different. I think this counts as development effort.
New theory: the «24 hours» refers to how long it takes their Munich DC to respond to a traceroute.
