They matched a price I fabricated

Right then, lads, I've done a proper stupid thing and need your collective wisdom.

Three weeks back I needed a dedi upgrade, saw Hostinger's pricing, thought "nah, can do better." Emailed sales with a screenshot of a "quote" I'd knocked up in GIMP—€45/mo for a Xeon E5, 64GB, 2x500GB SSD, the works. Looked official enough. Namedropped "OVHcloud" as the competitor.

They matched it within four hours. No verification call, no "forward us the email," just "we can do €45, 12 month term." I signed, paid, server live next day.

Now here's the twist. I mentioned my "OVHcloud deal" in a Discord, someone from OVHcloud proper DMs me—turns out they'd seen my matched price circulating, thought Hostinger had launched a stealth promo, and actually started offering €45/mo for that exact spec to stay competitive. My fiction became market rate. I've accidentally created a price war with a host I made up.

Ethically I'm in the muck, right? But also... the scrap gods provide?

Cheers lads, what would you do—come clean, keep quiet, or lean into it?

Oh wow, that is wild! I sent ticket to OVHcloud yesterday asking about their "promo" and they actually honored it, made test order and everything. So your bluff is real offer now, crazy!

I think you should not stress too much. Market finds price, you just find it faster. Maybe send anonymous tip to Hostinger so they know? Or just enjoy server, you did not force anyone to match.

Cheers!

This is not a BGP community string you can fabricate and hope the upstream accepts. Hostinger's sales team failed basic verification: no LOA, no competing quote on letterhead, no RPKI-equivalent attestation of the pricing's origin.

More concerning: you've introduced price distortion in a market with already-thin transit margins. If OVHcloud's €45 is below their blended IP transit + power + hardware cost at 3-year depreciation, this ends in either capacity reduction or quality degradation. I've seen this with IRR database pollution—one bad object propagates, suddenly filters fail everywhere.

Mark my words: check Hostinger's AS-SET in six months. If they start prepending or withdrawing routes to expensive peers, you'll know where the cuts landed.