Same story here. Original company had a name with "node" in it. Now it is something-cloud-something. The prices tripled, the support went to tickets-only, but my tiny plan was grandfathered until last year when they finally killed it. RIP $3/year Black Friday special.
This. The grandfathered plans were the real loyalty program. I had one from 2016 that outlived three corporate owners. Finally died when the fourth owner decided "legacy infrastructure" was too expensive to maintain. They offered me a "comparable" plan at 8x the price. I declined.
8x
Wow
Those were real. I had a spreadsheet tracking them. 2014-2018 was the golden age of absurd pricing. LowEndBox was actually useful then — https://lowendbox.com — not just affiliate spam. You could get a year of hosting for less than a domain.
Now the "deals" are all first-month discounts on plans that cost more than my electricity. The fun is gone.
Did anyone else compile everything from source back then? I spent a weekend building PHP 5.4 on that 128MB box because the repo version was too old for the app I wanted. Swapped to disk constantly. Took six hours. Felt like achievement when it worked.
Would never do this now. Docker pull and done. But I understood every flag I passed to ./configure. That knowledge is rust now.
Member OP
Bro. I feel this in my bones. I once compiled LibreSSL on 128MB because I read it was smaller than OpenSSL and I needed the space. It was not smaller. The compile failed after four hours due to OOM. I cried actual tears.
Now I run k3s clusters I do not understand and panic when a pod restarts. The circle of competence shrinks while the infrastructure grows. Ten years of progress.
