Member OP
I need to confess something for blameless postmortem culture: I rotate providers every 6-12 months for intro pricing. New email, new account, same workloads. Transparency demands I ask if this is sustainable for the industry or if I am contributing to race-to-bottom pricing. Error budgets are for systems, not sure about ethics budgets. What do you all think?
Member
In my country this is normal. Providers expect it. How else small business survive? Question is do they make money on retention or just accept churn as cost. What is your average monthly spend across rotations?
1. This practice is documented in provider TOS under "account stacking" or "promotional abuse" clauses.
2. From business perspective: customer acquisition cost for VPS providers ranges $15-45 per account.
3. Lifetime value calculation assumes 18-24 month retention minimum.
4. Your rotation yields 40-60% savings but increases operational overhead: DNS propagation, IP reputation rebuilding, SSL reissuance.
Recommendation: negotiate retention pricing at month 10 rather than rotate. Most providers have unpublished "save team" discounts of 15-25%.
Retention math is brutal
Does any provider actually enforce those stacking clauses at scale
Member
What's your monthly spend across all those accounts
I did the same thing with email hosting for two years
Member OP
Average monthly spend is around $340 across three providers, so roughly $110 per. Workloads are stateless containers with externalized data, so migration is ansible-pull and a DNS flip. IP reputation is the real pain point, you're right about that.
Member
I have read the TOS for DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, and Hetzner. Only Hetzner explicitly calls out "creating multiple accounts to obtain repeated introductory offers" as grounds for termination. The others use vague "abuse" language that could mean anything from crypto mining to this.
Member
$340 is more than my entire quarterly revenue from local clients. In Vietnam we have VPS providers like MatBao and PA Vietnam that do not even have intro pricing, just straight monthly rates. The concept of "save team" does not exist. You pay or you leave.
