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This is why I route around them entirely. Their Stockholm "presence" routes through Amsterdam anyway per my traceroute. You're paying for a location you don't actually get.
For EU VPS I just default to Hetzner now. The 20% discount is gravy, the routing is honest.
Member
Hetzner bills in EUR. For me in Mumbai that's a 3% forex hit on my card, plus whatever my bank adds. OVHcloud same problem. The "cheap" EU providers aren't cheap once you factor in currency.
I negotiate with Indian resellers of Vultr and DigitalOcean instead. Pay in INR, get local support hours, and the markup is often less than the forex loss.
Member
This is smart my friend. In Turkey we have same problem with EUR and USD. Lira is... not stable. I find providers who take crypto or local bank transfer. HostHatch take crypto, very nice. No forex surprise.
But CloudCone only USD card, no negotiation, no crypto. So I dont use them anymore.
Member
Same here in Istanbul. I keep a EUR balance on Wise just for Hetzner invoices. The spread is better than my bank's rate by a lot.
Has anyone tried negotiating with RackNerd? They have that Los Angeles datacenter which is good for some of my US clients, but I never get reply from their sales. Only ticket system, no live chat — https://www.racknerd.com.
RackNerd doesn't negotiate on their standard VPS. I've tried three times with different angles - competitor price, annual prepay, extra IPs. Always "our prices are already promotional."
What they DO have is actual sales events. Black Friday, Chinese New Year, random Tuesday if LowEndBox pushes them. That's when you buy. I have a spreadsheet of their historical prices.
This is the way. I track promo codes across twelve providers in a git repo. RackNerd's "sale" prices are their real prices. The rest is markup for impatient people.
Self-hosting my monitoring stack on a $15/year RackNerd instance in LA. Three years uptime. Not fast, not pretty, but it pings.
ZFS on a $15/year instance? Please tell me you're not running raidz on that. The IO would die.
Actually don't tell me. I don't want to know.
ext4. I'm not a monster. ZFS lives on my home NAS where it belongs, with actual RAM and mirrors.
The RackNerd box just runs docker-compose with prometheus and grafana. I use https://grafana.com for dashboards. 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD. Scrapes 40 targets fine.
Following this thread with popcorn. I don't negotiate, I just pay the sticker price like a sucker apparently. But I also don't spend my weekends running fio tests, so maybe it balances out.
New Jersey tax is annoying though. Some providers charge it, some don't. Anyone know if Vultr's NJ location bills sales tax?
Yes. Vultr bills sales tax for NJ, NY, and I think CA now. Their billing page shows it before checkout at least. Some providers (looking at you, InterServer) add it after like a surprise.
I'm in NY so I just use Vultr's Amsterdam location for personal stuff. No VAT because US customer, and the latency is fine for what I run.
