Member OP
I've been watching prices for two years now. And last July, Vultr ran this July sale that beat their November price by almost 20%. Same specs, same datacenter. I'm wondering if we're all waiting for November out of habit. Or if the real deals have shifted.
I grabbed a 4GB plan for $18/year in July. Their Black Friday was $22. Am I missing something. Or is this pattern real...
Depends on whose hardware you're buying. Vultr runs E5-2680v4s, 135W TDP. July sale was probably clearing Gen 4 nodes before a Gen 5 refresh. Black Friday pricing is on the new silicon, higher power draw, they need the margin.
I've got a pallet of E5-2630L v3s sitting in a warehouse in Secaucus. 60W TDP, 10 cores. The July movers are the old stock. November is new stock at higher baseline cost. Your $18 was end-of-life pricing on 8-year-old CPUs. The $22 is a 2024 Supermicro with DDR5. Not the same deal.
I have been tracking GreenCloudVPS and HostHatch for three years... March 2024 was the lowest price for both... not July or November... IP change was free in March but $5 in other months... very strange pattern... thank you for confirming my observation...
Member
Always chasing the sale dates like they're hunting easter eggs. Back when I ran the AS for a regional isp. We bought transit when we needed it. No sale. No black friday. Just purchase orders and handshake deals. But since you asked. I kept a spreadsheet. Out of boredom mostly. CloudCone and Time4VPS both had their lowest annual prices in March of 2024 and 2025. Something about fiscal year ends for the upstreams. The young people don't think about the carrier contracts. Those renew in Q1. The savings pass through in March. Then disappear by summer...
20% cheaper but same DC? Koi's network mix changed, guaranteed
Member OP
Carl, I checked the node ID in my panel. Both July and BF were vc2-4c-8gb plans. Same SKU. If they swapped silicon underneath, Vultr didn't tell me and the benchmark stayed flat. I'm not arguing there isn't new hardware in the DC, but my invoice says identical product.
The March thing is interesting though. I never watched March.
Member
That's the trick. SKU stays, BOM changes. I've seen it with transit too. Same port speed, new optics, new pricing underneath. The customer sees continuity, the provider books the depreciation differently.
March is the real window. I have 18 months of CloudCone data now. March 2024: $14.85/year on a 2GB. March 2025: $15.20. Black Friday 2024: $16.80. The pattern held.
Member
I run a small monitoring setup from Stockholm. Vultr, CloudCone, HostHatch, GreenCloud. Ping only, not prices. But I noticed HostHatch Stockholm had packet loss spikes in July 2024 that didn't repeat in November. My guess: July sale = oversubscribed nodes, November = normal capacity. Cheaper because worse.
GreenCloudVPS Vietnam DC very stable in March... I ping from Ho Chi Minh City... 2ms... July sale had routing via Hong Kong for two weeks... 35ms... they fixed after I ticket... March is better for Asia... not just price...
Bingo. July is Q3. Providers are sweating OpEx before the holiday traffic spike. They'll stuff a node to 90% to move the inventory. November they've already provisioned for Christmas retail load. The discount is thinner because the density is thinner.
My E5s in Secaucus? Bought them in March from a liquidator. Fiscal year end for three different OEMs.
