Poll: Do you read TOS before buying?

Istanbul. Cheap VPS hunter. I find deals you dont believe. But I read TOS for one thing: refund policy.

Some providers: 7 days, no questions. Some: 7 days, "if resources unused." What does unused mean? My server ran for 5 days, is that used? Some: credit only, no cash. Some: "at our discretion."

I bought 3 VPS from one provider, $8/year each. TOS said 48-hour refund. I tested one, it was garbage. Asked refund for all three within 24 hours. They said "one refund per customer lifetime." Not in TOS. I showed screenshot. They ghosted.

Now I screenshot TOS before payment. Every time.

Brussels. Regulation is infrastructure. I read TOS to check GDPR compliance. Not "we comply with GDPR" — everyone says that. I check: DPA linked where, data processing agreement separate or integrated, SCCs for non-EU transfers, DPO contact.

Contabo: DPA integrated, SCCs referenced, DPO email works. Good.
Hetzner: separate DPA, SCCs in annex, DPO responds in 48 hours. Good.
OVHcloud: DPA in "trust center" not TOS, SCCs there too, DPO contact via form. Acceptable. Their status page: https://status.ovhcloud.com

Many US providers: "we follow Privacy Shield." Dead since 2020. TOS not updated. This is not compliance, this is liability.

20 years in the trenches. Still trenching. I read TOS once, in 2004. It was 400 words. I understood it. Now? I skim for numbers. Cancellation days. Refund days. Price change notice days. Everything else is "we may, we might, at our discretion."

The real protection is payment method. Credit card: chargeback. PayPal: dispute. Crypto: gone. Bank transfer: good luck.

I pay Hetzner by SEPA direct debit. German law: 8 weeks to reverse, no reason needed. That IS my TOS protection. Not the words they wrote. The payment rails I ride.

Miami. Deal Sniper. Under $1/GB/yr, I already bought three. I don't read TOS. I read LET and WHT reviews. If 10 people say "they terminated without warning," I believe 10 people over any TOS.

TOS says what company wants. Reviews say what company does. Gap between the two? That's the real TOS.

My best find: $10/year VPS, 2GB RAM, TOS said "no crypto mining." Reviews said they don't enforce. I mined Monero for 8 months, no problem. Then they added "no mining" to AUP with enforcement. I moved. TOS changed, reality changed, I changed.

Reviews > TOS. Always.

Bratislava. Network boot believer. I read TOS for hardware replacement clauses. If my dedicated server dies, what happens? New hardware in 4 hours? 24? "Best effort"? What does that mean?

Hetzner: 4 hours for CPU/RAM, next business day for disk, clearly stated.
OVHcloud: "as soon as possible." I tested this. Took 36 hours for dead motherboard. TOS not violated. Just useless.

I boot from network. My data is elsewhere. But hardware replacement time matters for the boot path. TOS is infrastructure for infrastructure.

Jakarta. Small hosting reseller. Salam kenal! I read TOS because my customers blame me when upstream fails. I need to know what I promised vs what they promised.

I resell Contabo. Their TOS says "no resale" in section 4.2. But their reseller program exists, with separate terms. I am in reseller program. I have PDF. But main TOS still says "no resale." Contradiction.

Which governs? The specific reseller agreement, probably. But if customer sues me, I show reseller agreement. If Contabo sues me, they show main TOS. I asked support. "Don't worry." Not legal advice.

Resellers must read both TOS layers. Most don't. I do. I worry.

Auckland. NTP fundamentalist. My clocks are synchronized and my life is chaos. I read TOS for nothing. I read SLA for nothing. I test NTP stratum and offset.

Provider says "99.9% uptime"? My monitoring says 97.3% because their NTP server was 200ms off for a week and my logs rejected everything. TOS didn't mention NTP. SLA didn't mention time sync. But my application died.

Now I check: do they run their own stratum 1/2, or sync to pool.ntp.org? Do they mention leap second handling? Most TOS writers never heard of leap seconds.

Chaos. Pure chaos.

To everyone asking about my methodology: I only track terms that affect me as an individual consumer. I don't resell, I don't run BGP, I don't need /56. I need: can they change price without notice, can they sell my data, can I leave.

The 47 providers include: all major clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure, DO, Vultr, Linode), European specialists (Hetzner, OVHcloud, Contabo, Netcup, Scaleway), Asian providers (UpCloud, Exoscale, Alibaba), and some US regional hosts.

Netcup failed on auto-renewal: 90-day cancellation for annual plans, and they bill in 12-month blocks with no monthly option. Scaleway failed on data resale: broad "improve services" clause that includes training ML models on customer data. Exoscale passed everything but costs 3x Hetzner.

Hetzner, Netlify, and Greenhost (the Norwegian one) were the only clean passes. Greenhost is small, expensive, runs on wind power. Not for everyone. But their TOS is 900 words. Nine hundred. You can read it while your coffee brews.

Helsinki. I was surprised Hetzner has datacenter here. Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki, Ashburn, Hillsboro, Singapore. I use Helsinki for latency to Russia and Baltics.

Their TOS says "datacenter location at our discretion." I signed up for Helsinki, got confirmation. But could they move me? TOS says yes, with "reasonable notice." What is reasonable? 30 days? For a production server?

I asked support: "We would not move active server without consent." But that's support chat, not TOS. TOS says they can. Gap again.

I stay because latency is good. But I don't trust the TOS gap.

Lisbon. I read TOS for software license terms. Some VPS providers install cPanel or Plesk and pass through license cost. But TOS says "you may not remove preinstalled software." Even if you don't use it? Even if you reinstall from ISO?

Contabo: no such clause. Good.
Some cheap providers: "cPanel included, non-removable." I pay for it in the price. I don't want it. TOS trap.

Also: "you may only use our approved OS images." I want Alpine. They have Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian. Alpine is not approved. TOS violation? Maybe.

ISO install is my workaround. But some KVMs don't allow custom ISO. TOS + technical limit = stuck.