Berlin1
Member
Your cloud is just someone else's computer with worse billing practices.
Finally migrated off auto-renewal hell
kate3
Member
Speaking of which, how many of these six were from hosts that oversell RAM by 3x and hope nobody notices? The 2GB special is classic -- they sell 2GB to four people on a 2GB node.
virsh list --all | wc -l: 47
Three of the six were budget VPS shops. One was a "lifetime deal" host that died in 2021 but kept billing through a reseller shell. Another was a CDN I never configured after signup. The sixth was Adobe, which is its own category of hostage situation.
Adobe. You have my sympathy. I finally broke free of Creative Cloud last year, replaced with Affinity and DaVinci. The cancellation call where they put you through to "retention specialists" -- pure theater.
Adobe retention specialists are the only humans who have ever asked me "what would make you stay" about software. I said "a buy button." They did not have that SKU.
This.
DNS for my lab is now handled by a $5/mo Vultr instance in Sydney. Latency to Melbourne is 12ms, I can live with that. Auto-renew is off, calendar reminder set for 11 months. Paranoid but cheaper.
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.
Control panel. I rent a KS-1 in Gravelines, €4.99, no panel, just iKVM and my own install. If I forget it exists the money still leaves my account but at least I own the waste.
Following.