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GreenCloudVPS had a Vietnam node that was actually good for local clients here. 30ms, cheap storage VPS. When they died I moved everyone to Vultr Singapore, 3x the price, but at least Vultr answers tickets. The 2021 promo price was $24/year for 1TB storage. Nothing matches that now.
Leaseweb going to private equity is the one that stings me. I had a dedi in Frankfurt, 30 EUR/mo auction server, ran it for years. New owners jacked renewal to 90 EUR with "market rate adjustment." I noped out to Hetzner Nuremberg, same price as my old Leaseweb rate, better network. I use https://www.hetzner.com/sb for that.
Private equity is just a zombie with a spreadsheet.
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This. The Leaseweb play was classic: buy, cut opex, raise prices, churn the price-sensitive customers, keep the enterprise ones who don't notice line items. The infrastructure was fine. The business model became extraction.
I don't blame anyone who left. I blame the structure that made leaving rational.
My bakery's website was on a Hostinger "lifetime" shared plan from 2021. $72 one-time. Died in March, no notice, just DNS stopped resolving. I was in Portland, they have a Phoenix datacenter, not that it mattered because I couldn't reach anyone.
Moved to their regular $3/mo plan to get support. So I paid twice. Lifetime.
This is why I only buy annual now. No more than 12 months of exposure. The discount is worse but the sleep is better.
Same here. Annual max. Learned from a "lifetime" VPN that lasted 14 months.
Annual is still credit. I do monthly on everything except one Hetzner dedicated where the annual discount was 10% and I know where their datacenters are.
Falkenstein. Nuremberg. Helsinki. Real places. Real company. Still not lifetime.
Updated the spreadsheet: added "death rattle" column per Hel's suggestion. Also added payment method because the crypto rows are embarrassing to look at.
New entry: Time4VPS didn't technically die, they pivoted to "Oracle Cloud free tier consulting" which is somehow worse. You pay them to help you game Oracle's always-free limits. That's not a business, that's a parasitism tutorial.
Oracle free tier is its own thread. I got suspended after 8 months for "suspicious activity" which was running a cron job. Their appeal system is a chatbot that links to docs that don't exist. Time4VPS charging to navigate that is... actually maybe fair value.
OVHcloud in your dead column surprises me. They're huge, French government contracts, etc. What died specifically?
