Renewal jumped 340%. What now?

I signed up with Contabo last year on their yearly plan — $18 for 12 months of 1GB RAM and 20GB SSD. Just got the renewal invoice: $79.20. No warning email, no grace period. The billing portal shows "promotional pricing expired" in grey text I definitely missed during checkout.

I run a small WordPress site for my knitting circle and a Nextcloud instance for family photo backups. Nothing critical, but I did test my restore last month — 3-2-1 rule, always — and it works.

My question: is this normal industry practice now? Are there providers that actually honor intro rates for renewals? I have until August 18 to decide before the invoice auto-charges.

Current checklist:

• Downloaded all backups to local NAS
• Screenshot of original pricing page (no TOS visible without login)
• Ticket opened with Contabo, no reply in 48h

• You absolutely missed the fine print
  
  • Every promo has an asterisk
  • Contabo's ToS has something about this from memory
  • I think they reserve the right to revert introductory rates to standard pricing
• Your options now are basically:
  
  • Pay the $79.20 and cry
  • Migrate everything before August 18
  • Negotiate with support (good luck)
• Things you should have done:
  
  • Set a calendar reminder 30 days before renewal
  • Screenshot the checkout flow with pricing
  • Read the TOS during signup (I know, I know)
• Providers that do multi-year locks:
  
  • OVHcloud does 3-year price freeze
  • Vultr honors first renewal at 50% bump only
  • Hetzner is notorious for 400%+ jumps so avoid

Your real mistake was tying a "premium" workflow to a budget domain and budget host. I backordered a dropped .io last week for $89 that'll flip for 4 figures, and you're sweating $61?

Anyway, your domain is probably .club or .xyz based on this whole vibe. Contabo's brand sounds like something I'd register ironically. Did you even check if the provider's own domain is on a backorder list? That tells you everything about their stability.

My last UDRP complaint was against a "host" whose domain expired mid-trial. Poetic justice.

Docker Compose, Caddy reverse proxy, Nextcloud AIO container. Your knitting site gets 12 visitors a month. A 1GB VPS is absurd overkill for that workload.

I migrated my entire stack — WordPress, Nextcloud, Gitea, WireGuard — to a used Thin Client from 2019. Total hardware cost: $23 one time. Electricity maybe $2/month. No renewal surprises because no provider.

The only recurring cost is my domain, and I control the TTL, the DNS, the backups. You already have a NAS. Add a second node, keep your 3-2-1 rule, done. Backups are handled with https://restic.net.

Thank you for sharing this story

The same thing happened to me at Hetzner last year my ip stayed the same but my wallet did not

I moved to OVHcloud after that and locked a 2-year deal no jump yet

Very polite of you to test your restore most people skip that step