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Finally hit negative cost of ownership

General Discussion by GeorgeNmp 4 replies 563 views
GeorgeNmp

Member OP

AS64512

#1

After eighteen months of systematic arbitrage across referral programs, I've reached the improbable state where hosting pays me. Current tally:

  • InterServer referral credits: $340 accrued
  • GreenCloudVPS signup bonuses (rotating identities via LLCs): €220
  • Hetzner price-match guarantees exploited during their 2025 pricing error: €180
  • Leaseweb affiliate clawbacks reversed due to their TOS ambiguity: $95

Total hosting costs across 7 VPS instances: $835
Total credits/cash extracted: $835

Net: $0 out of pocket, plus residual BGP session at HostHatch for my ASN announcement experiments.

The sustainability question is whether this constitutes fraud or merely aggressive optimization. Their TOS permits multiple referrals per "organization." I formed organizations. Their price-match policy had no temporal limit. I waited.

Curious where t

iBGP, eBGP, don't care, just peer
wendy

Member

#2

In my experience, the Windows Server licensing costs alone would have destroyed this model, which is why I find the Linux-centric arbitrage space somewhat amusing. To be fair, your LLC formation costs and registered agent fees aren't captured here, so true negative cost may be elusive. Still, the TOS reading is impressively literal.

Have you tried restarting it?
mediaaustin

Member

Deliverability Nerd

#3

The email infrastructure required for rotating LLC identities probably got you blocklisted somewhere. For what it's worth, if any of those referral bonuses required confirmed opt-in from unique addresses, and you used catch-alls or forwarding, you've likely contaminated IP reputation for unrelated senders. The ethics aren't abstract; they have deliverability consequences for bystanders.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
marcus_qc

Member

3 #4
GeorgeNmp said:
InterServer referral credits: $340 accrued

Hey folks, gonna be super real here I've been a customer of InterServer for years and I absolutely saw this pattern. Super stoked someone finally posted about it openly. They left it alone because honestly? Their referral TOS was garbage and they knew it. Fixed now. Your old credits are grandfathered, no clawback.

New policy caps at 3 referrals per tax ID. Learned their lesson. Thanks for the nudge, @GeorgeNmp.

42U and still growing
lucgone

Member

Le Baguette

#5

Which 7 VPS providers, exactly? You only named four.

Vive la résistance... électrique

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