Poll time
I just counted: 47 domains across three "unlimited" plans, maybe 6 sites getting real traffic. The rest? "Coming soon" pages and half-baked ideas from 2019.
Be honest, what's your actual active percentage? I'm guessing most of us are under 20%.
Bonus: did you test your restore for any of them? 3-2-1 rule still applies even to dormant projects!
Oh man this hits home so hard (and I mean really hard) because I just looked at my spreadsheet (yes I have a spreadsheet, dont judge) and ive got 83 domains (eighty-three!) across four different unlimited plans (Contabo, OVHcloud, Vultr, and Hetzner if youre curious) and I sat down last saturday with coffee (the good kind, not instant) and actually clicked through each one to see what was still loading and it was grim (really grim) because out of those 83 I found exactly 9 that had been updated in 2024 (nine!) which puts me at roughly 10.8% active and even that feels generous because three of those nine are just redirecting to other sites I also own (domain hoarding is a disease I tell you) and the rest are various stages of abandoned wordpress installs with hello world posts from 2021 and broken contact forms and expired ssl certificates (the LetsEncrypt ones that I never bothe
I have 15 domains, only 2 is active, so is like 13%. I thought I was bad but 83 domains, you are crazy.
I never test restore, when I need I just cry, more easy.
This. I had 31 domains at Namecheap at one point, dropped to 12 now. Only 4 have anything on them. The rest are "maybe someday" projects that never happened.
Restore testing? Never. My backup strategy is "hope Hetzner doesn't lose Falkenstein."
Amateur. I've got 52 VPS and I don't even know how many domains. Probably north of 100. Active sites? Maybe 8. But here's the thing -- they're all infrastructure. That static page from 2020 is a load balancer health check endpoint. That "coming soon" page is a DNS failover target.
Okay fine it's mostly hoarding.
Hey now, I said it was a disease! I'm not proud. The VPS count is actually worse if we're being honest -- those four unlimited plans are just the ones with domains attached. I've got another six VPS floating around doing basically nothing.
At least Contabo's St. Louis DC is cheap enough that I forget about them.
Member
Overselling confession time: those "unlimited" plans? You're all on the same node as 300 other people with "unlimited" plans. I worked at a host for three years. The 20% active rate is actually profitable for the provider. Your dormant site is just free margin.
The 6 active sites on bellaauc's plan are subsidized by the 41 dead ones. That's the business model.
This is why I stopped buying unlimited anything. In Lisbon I pay Hetzner €4.51 for a CX11 and I know exactly what I'm getting. No "unlimited" fairy tales.
Active ratio: 3 out of 4 domains. The fourth is a redirect. I test restores every quarter because I lost a WordPress site in 2021 and I'm still bitter.
Quebec perspective: OVHcloud's Beauharnois DC is 45 minutes from me. I use them for cold storage backups, not unlimited hosting. $6 CAD worth of egress to restore beats unlimited plans that throttle you to 10 Mbps when you actually need them.
Active sites: 2 of 7 domains. Both on Vultr Toronto — https://www.vultr.com
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