Pay monthly or yearly for hosting?

67 days and elena is STILL mad about this, sorry for the bump but did anyone actually find a provider that didn't ghost them

Elena laughed at this and then cried a little because it's true

Has anyone tried the monthly route with Contabo or OVHcloud and actually stuck around long enough to know if they're stable elena is not making the yearly mistake again but also doesn't want to move shops every three months

91 days, figured this thread was dead but

I do monthly now, always, no exceptions

The twenty percent savings is just a coupon for "maybe we steal your money"

Walt's "scheduled maintenance" thing is exactly why I said what I said above, that's not maintenance that's a ghost ship

Elena if you're still around, who was it? You don't have to name names but was it one of the big cheap ones or something obscure

I keep a tarball of the site and a dump of the db updated weekly, rsync to a box I control

The hosting is just the public face, the actual data lives where I can grab it in ten minutes

Hank if you're reading this, do that before you worry about monthly vs yearly

The payment schedule doesn't matter if you can't leave in an afternoon

Four months of "scheduled maintenance" sounds like a liquidation with extra steps

Anyway, since this thread's been dead for three months, did anyone actually switch providers over this or are we all still paying yearly and hoping

I went monthly at InterServer after a similar scare and sleep better but the invoice spam is real

116 days, nice, I am very timely

This is why I keep a local backup that I verify monthly, regardless of what the host promises

For payment I do a split: one cheap VPS monthly at HostHatch, one yearly at Leaseweb for the stable stuff that does not change

Yearly only if they have been around five-plus years and publish actual ownership info, not just a logo and a smile

The twenty percent savings are real but they are also a loan you are giving to a company that might disappear

Monthly is insurance, yearly is a bet, I do both but never all of one

Did anyone in this thread ever actually solve the yearly-payments problem or are we all just trading horror stories now

I pay monthly at Contabo and sleep fine. The twenty percent savings never seemed worth the risk after a friend lost everything to a host that "restructured" over a weekend

That's not a host that's a hostage situation

Has anyone here used escrow or something similar for yearly deals or is that not a thing in this space

Late to this but

I pay monthly now after getting stung once. The "savings" on yearly aren't real savings if the provider disappears. For what it's worth I use Contabo (https://contabo.com) for one project and they've been solid, but I still wouldn't go yearly with anyone at this point.

Did you ever end up finding a setup you're comfortable with?

139 days but this thread is still relevant so here goes

This is exactly why we built Hetzner's escrow release model -- https://www.hetzner.com

Yearly billing unlocks a discount but funds hit our account in monthly chunks, so if we vanished tomorrow (we won't) you'd have 11/12 of your money recoverable

Not every provider does this, obviously, so for the places that don't, monthly is your insurance policy

Elena, did you ever get any of that data back or was it a total loss

You know what, you're absolutely right and I never even thought of it that way at the time — I was just so busy being angry about my own stupidity that I didn't clock the obvious

This was years ago but it was definitely some kind of slow-motion exit scam, they kept stringing people along with "we're migrating to new infrastructure" emails until one day the ticket portal just 404'd

Anyway the actual lesson I should have led with: if you're going yearly, don't do it with some random place you've never heard of just because the price looks good, and definitely don't do three years like I did, that was deranged

These days I do yearly with CloudCone because I've been with them forever and I actually trust them, but everyone else gets monthly from me, even if it costs more

The peace of mind is worth it

151 days, but this still feels relevant because people keep making the same mistake

The real lesson isn't "never pay yearly" — it's "never pay yearly to a provider you haven't stress-tested for at least six months on monthly billing first"

I run everything on monthly with Contabo and InterServer now, both solid for two-plus years. The second either of them starts acting weird I'm gone with maybe a week of sunk cost

Yearly discounts are basically a loan you're giving to a company that might disappear. Elena learned that the hard way

Did you ever solve this, elena? 161 days and I'm guessing the answer is "found a new host and moved on"

I do monthly at Vultr now, used to do yearly at Leaseweb before they got weird about support tickets

The thing nobody mentions is that yearly locks your price but monthly lets you dodge when the service goes downhill, and you see it coming because the ticket replies slow down first

That's the thing that made me wince, three years is just betting against yourself at that point