Is anyone actually saving money with these lifetime VPS deals?

Third "lifetime" host down in 18 months. Here's my sad spreadsheet:

• Hostinger $35 LTD (Mar 2024) — dead Jun 2024, "platform restructure"
• GreenCloudVPS $29 LTD (Jul 2024) — dead Jan 2025, ticket portal 404'd
• CloudCone $39 LTD (Nov 2024) — suspended last week, "payment required" despite LTD

Total spent: $103. Total uptime value if I'd done monthly at same spec: roughly $144. So I'm technically "ahead" but the migration headache isn't worth £20 of savings.

Is anyone actually winning with these? Or is it pure lottery? — Jane @ Contabo

OpenVZ 6, 2.6.32 kernel, no cgroup v2 support. That's your CloudCone spec, I guarantee it. The "virtualization tax" on these platforms is absurd—you're not getting a VPS, you're getting a chroot with extra steps.

Real cost breakdown: colo for 1U in budget datacenter, $40/mo. E5-2670 v2, $30 on eBay. They need 20+ LTDs just to cover year one hardware, ignoring power, transit, IP fees. The math only works if:

• They never replace hardware (your 18 month average)
• They upsell "migration" later
• They're burning investor/owner cash for "growth"

KVM with proper virtio-net, qcow2 on Ceph—that's real VPS infrastructure. These LTDs are lottery tickets with worse odds.