20 years. I've seen this cycle three times now. 2008 "HostGator unlimited" resellers, 2014 "Bitcoin VPS" anonymous shops, now 2024-2025 "founding customer" fake brands. Same psychology: fear of missing out, same victim profile: price-sensitive technical people who should know better.
The only new twist is the ASN and routing replication. That takes more skill than the old scams. Be worried about what the next iteration looks like.
What does everyone use for monitoring? I have 6 boxes and I only notice they are down when my Discord bot stops working. Need something that emails me, not another dashboard to ignore.
UptimeRobot free tier, 50 monitors, email alerts. Or Pushover if you want phone notification. I have both, UptimeRobot for "is it up," custom Prometheus for "is it performing."
Not relevant to thread but: monitoring does not prevent exit scam. Backups do. 3-2-1 rule, even for "cheap" VPS.
Following this thread. I almost signed up for "Vultr" in July, the 50% deal. Something felt off about the SSL certificate being from Sectigo not DigiCert like my real Vultr account. Random detail but it stopped me.
Good catch. Real Vultr uses DigiCert, real OVHcloud uses Sectigo actually, so that would not have helped for the first scam. But the "Vultr" scam used Let's Encrypt with 90-day renewal, you could see the chain was different if you looked — https://crt.sh makes that easy.
WHOIS dates: ovhcloud-promo.com created 2024-09-15, vultr-launch.com created 2025-05-20. Both privacy-protected, both Namecheap. Real companies do not use Namecheap for their primary domain.
BuyVM uses Namecheap. Hetzner used to. This is not a reliable signal.
Better signal: real companies have MX records that work. Scams have MX that bounces or goes to forwarder. Test before you buy.
This thread saved me. Was about to sign up for "HostHatch founding customer 60% off" email that arrived today. Domain is hosthatch-limited.com. Checked ASN, registered last month. Same scam.
Thank you all.
