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Same here my Contabo in Singapore give 45ms to Bandung. OVHcloud Singapore give 38ms. Not big difference lah. But RackNerd Los Angeles give 180ms, very bad for bot. I move bot to Contabo also.
Sam your method can work for RackNerd or not? They very cheap already.
Hetzner is not playing this game. I ask for price match, they send me link to auction page. The auction page! Like I am a student looking for 10 year old Xeon. Very gemütlich for them, not for me.
But their Falkenstein network is solid. My kubernetes cluster there has uptime I cannot complain about, only the yaml I can.
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I ran it for a week. Here is the full dump if you want to parse it:
Contabo : n=6048, μ=8.19, σ=0.31, p95=8.7, p99=9.4
OVHcloud : n=6048, μ=20.14, σ=0.79, p95=21.2, p99=22.8Smokeping from my flat in Stockholm, target is my own VM IPs, not their frontends. The 12ms is real and consistent. Whether it matters is what Sam said: your call.
I try same tactic with Vultr last month. They say "we do not price match promotional periods." Very direct. No three back-and-forth. I stay because their Taipei routing to my home ISP is best among five I tested. Sometimes you pay for the fiber path not the specs.
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The real lesson is not the threat. It is having the cart ready. I have done this dance with three providers. The ones who fold are the ones who believe you will click "checkout." Have the export script tested, have the DNS TTL lowered, have the screenshot. Theatrical commitment.
My Lisbon office runs on a Hetzner box in Falkenstein. 42ms. I do not notice it. The users in Porto notice 12ms more to Nuremberg. Perception is geography.
Following this thread. I have renewal with Hostinger coming up, will try the same. Do you contact billing or support first?
I opened a general ticket, got moved to billing on second reply. First reply was "promotional pricing is for new customers only." That is when I attached the OVHcloud cart screenshot and said "I am a new customer there unless you match." Third reply was the match.
Have the cart ready. This is what netop_mares said and it is correct.
I tried this with RackNerd. They have no ticket system, only email to sales. Email to sales. I sent three messages, got one reply "current pricing is already promotional." Then silence. My problems were successfully redirected to /dev/null.
The box works though. $12/yr for 1GB in Los Angeles. I use it for backup DNS and nothing else.
In Greece we have worse problem. Contabo has no Athens presence, closest is Nuremberg. My traceroute goes through Milan then Frankfurt then Nuremberg. 68ms. I tried OVHcloud, same path, 71ms. I tried Hetzner Nuremberg, 65ms. All same fiber, all same problem.
The negotiation only helps if you have options. Here we do not have options, only different logos on same slow pipe.