Not OVHcloud the company. My "lifetime" promo with them. 2021 special: 2EUR/mo VPS for life, then they reclassified it as "introductory" after 18 months and bumped to 5EUR. I left. The provider lived, the deal died.
Should clarify in spreadsheet. "Dead" means the promo, not always the company.
This distinction matters. Contabo still exists but my 2021 "lifetime" 4GB VPS for 3EUR got "deprecated" and they offered me a "comparable" 4GB for 6EUR. Comparable except double the price.
I stayed because moving a German VPS to somewhere else with those specs at 3EUR is impossible. So they won. Partially.
Vultr killed my "lifetime" $2.50 block storage promo by simply removing the product line. "Classic" block storage, they called it. Emailed saying migrate to "High Performance" at 4x cost or lose data in 30 days.
I migrated to Hetzner Storage Box. Less convenient API, but 10EUR/TB and no games.
Member
This is the actual pattern. Not bankruptcy, not acquisition. Product line termination with forced migration to higher-margin SKUs. The "lifetime" was lifetime of the SKU, not the customer relationship.
We need a new term. "Lifetime" should be "SKU lifetime." Shorter than most houseplants.
Final spreadsheet update for today: added "termination type" column with values: bankruptcy, acquisition, price reclass, product kill, zombie.
The 2021 cohort: 4 product kills, 3 price reclasses, 2 bankruptcies, 2 zombies, 1 acquisition, 1 pivot-to-parasite.
Will do 2022 cohort next year if I hate myself enough.
Maybe I will read that spreadsheet. Maybe I will not buy any more. Maybe thank you, again.
