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Cloudatcost one time payment now has a recurring payment

9 points by drKarl ↗ HN
Cloudatcost updated their ToS and now for the "one time payment" servers now there's a yearly recurring "maintenance" fee of $9. They didn't advertise that change, just updated their ToS.

8 comments

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bigiain
Heh - just got (and paid) the invoice for this... I got a "lifetime" vps from them in 2013 - knowing full well it wasn't ever going to be a sustainable business that way. It's easily worth it (for me anyway) to throw them $9 a year to help keep them afloat.

I think you're right that they didn't communicate this well - the first I heard of it was an email from their billing department with the subject: "24 Hour Server Suspension Warning"

anonymoushn
Why did you choose to pay the invoice? Has the service ever been usable?
bigiain
Yep - I do a far bit of "stupid idea testing" and joke websites for friends to laugh at. I use it as a VPN server sometimes. It's almost certainly hideously over sold on the hardware it sits on, but for a lot of stuff I don't really care... I'm happy enough with what I get from them to not be too fussed by them asking me for $9/year for what they said I'd get for my one time $35 payment... (And I realise that I'm super privileged being able to write off $9 as "an expensive beer" rather than "the difference between making rent this month or not"...)
anonymoushn
Ok, for me the 70% downtime means I save time by using some other provider.
drKarl
Yeah, my biggest complain is that I found out about that with a "24 Hour Server Suspension Warning" rather than with an informative notice mail.
martin-adams
I've been hit by this. I do not want to accept the terms because while $9 may seem insignificant, who says they wont double it every 6 months?

The communication has been extremely poor.