Last year, I decided to get my own VPS at Cloudatcost and manage all aspects of my Blog on my personal server. Well, that did not turn out so well after all. Here’s my story:
I was enticed by their claims of being Canada’s largest hosting company, lean organizational structure, 80% off one-time server cost etc, etc.. All, just marketing talk, it turns out.
I setup my personal webspace with them, invested a lot of time setting things up.. then BAM, one day my server gets deleted!
To make matters worse, last month, they amended their “terms of service” and added in a “maintenance fee” of 9$ annually. While not terribly expensive, it just speaks volumes about their underhanded approach. There was no prior intimation explaining the need for an added revenue stream for maintenance etc.. Just an email with the subject line “24 Hour Server Suspension Warning”:
Hello,
I would like to thank you for choosing us to host your servers.
As we value your business it is important to keep your account up to date.You currently have an invoice that has not been paid.
If this invoice is not paid your service will be put in to a suspended state and deleted.
If you would like to cancel this server please let us know.
If you have any issues please contact us as this is an automated process.
I did end up paying the 9$ as I needed time to try and retrieve my data – See, I had a backup VPS also hosted with Cloudatcost.. but that was down too! Then, things got worse.. All my support requests went unheeded. (Both) My servers have been down for the past 4 weeks.
This is when I decided that for the long term, Cloud@Cost is not a viable option (even as a toy/dev server), and I ended up opening an account on WordPress.
TL;DR
DO NOT sign up with Cloud@Cost. They are an unscrupulous lot, offer 0 support and could potentially DELETE your data/server randomly.
Even a personal NAS connected to your home internet has greater reliability than the so called SSD-backed servers offered by these folks! Lesson learnt the hard way.
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