[Prepaid-Host] Price adjustment on older promo root servers — effective 1 Aug 2026

PrepaidHost · July 19

Heads-up for the Prepaid-Host customers here. I'm posting this myself rather than letting it get "discovered" — you'll see the emails anyway, so here's the full thing, numbers and reasoning included.

What's changing

We're adjusting the price of some of our older promo root server plans — mainly the RAM-heavy ones (26 GB and up), plus a few older 20–24 GB promos. Renewals only, nothing changes for a period you've already paid for, and nothing goes up by more than ~35 %. The smaller 16 GB promos we adjusted recently stay untouched.

Plan (KVM, 1 IPv4 incl.)	old	new
26 GB / 6 vCores	€8.99 / €9.99	€11.99 / €13.49
20–24 GB / 6 vCores	€9.49	€12.49
36 GB / 8 vCores	€14.99	€18.49
48 GB / 10–12 vCores	€19.99	€23.49

Effective 1 August 2026, renewals only. You can still renew at your current price before 1 August — that locks the old rate for that prepaid period, and yes, you can prepay a year or two upfront if you'd rather. Renewals after that move to the new price.

The why — and I'll pre-empt the obvious objection

The fair pushback is "you already own the RAM, NVMe and IPs in those nodes, so why do spot prices matter?" For the parts already installed: they don't. It's the resupply that bites — and right now nearly everything we need is scarce or up sharply at once:

Replacements are at today's prices. A 15 TB enterprise NVMe we sourced for ~€1.4–1.8k in 2025 is €6–7k now. Every failed drive is a 3–4x hit versus what those nodes were priced around.
Utilisation keeps climbing while machines expire. We're running well below our last peak in machine count, yet RAM/storage commit keeps rising — so we need to ADD capacity, into a market where there's no cheap capacity to add.
Availability, not just price. The DDR4 these nodes run is being wound down toward EOL to free fab capacity for AI memory, so our exact RAM type is getting scarce, not just pricey. High-capacity enterprise NVMe is short and up 3–4x. And IPv4 is exhausted — no free RIR blocks, secondary-market only. We still bundle the IPv4 free, but all three being scarce at once is the actual squeeze.
No new-deal bridge. Normally we'd float fresh promos on cheaper hardware and let the old ones age out — but with nothing cheap or even readily available to build on right now, that valve is gone too.

So it's replacement + utilisation + cash flow, not "the DIMMs in your VM appreciated." Nudging the oldest, most RAM-dense promos up is what frees the resources to keep serving everyone who stays — at the same specs.

No new hidden fees. IPv4 stays bundled at no charge. And prepaid stays prepaid — no contract, no notice period, nothing auto-charging you that you can't stop. If the new price doesn't fit, just let it expire; if it's an idler, honestly that's the capacity we most want back right now. "Vote with your wallet" is a completely legit move here and it costs you nothing.

Will you drop prices again when RAM/NAND normalises?

Straight answer: we won't retroactively cut an existing plan. When hardware gets cheaper again we do what we've always done — post fresh deals, open to existing customers too, you just migrate your own data. Promising a rollback would be the dishonest answer, so I won't.

That's the whole picture. Ask away — I'll answer straight.

— Christopher, Prepaid-Host

Alyx · July 19

Thanks for the wall of text generated by AI.
This really shows how much you value your customers.

Motion3549 · July 19

prepare for battle

theraw · July 19

let's hope your claude subscription price doesn't go higher or you might charge us more only to talk to us.

hyperblast · July 19

@PrepaidHost said: and nothing goes up by more than ~35 %.

emgh · July 19

ai slop

gatewaysentryllc · July 19

@Alyx said:
Thanks for the wall of text generated by AI.
This really shows how much you value your customers.

depending on Claude version its acceptable, those Claude fable tokens ain't cheap.

wii747 · July 19

Who needs AI it’s destroying LET deals

tentor · July 19

@gatewaysentryllc said:

@Alyx said:
Thanks for the wall of text generated by AI.
This really shows how much you value your customers.

depending on Claude version its acceptable, those Claude fable tokens ain't cheap.

Tokens might be expensive but the talk isn't for sure

barbaros · July 19

@Alyx said:
Thanks for the wall of text generated by AI.
This really shows how much you value your customers.

That's why they are increasing the service costs so they can keep afford paying for AI

yoursunny · July 19

Price Increase on Recurring Dealz Hall of Predatoriness

forest · July 19

@PrepaidHost said: The DDR4 these nodes run is being wound down toward EOL to free fab capacity for AI memory, so our exact RAM type is getting scarce

And so, by posting AI slop totally unnecessarily, you're exacerbating the problem. Thanks.

nghialele · July 19

Oh so they use "adjustment"

tzuli · July 19

@hecatae said:
I only use Prepaid Host to compile Openwrt, 26GB RAM, 16 CPU and 300GB SSD should be able to cope with this no issue.

today my rootserver has been blocked with a trex warning.

.

@wangdeng said:
🚨 URGENT WARNING: This Hosting Provider Is Actively Spying on Your Server – Your Files Are Not Safe 🚨

🔍 Here's what really happened:
Their system detected the exact command and path:
/usr/bin/qbittorrent-nox -d

That means they are actively scanning your running processes

.

@rattlecattle said:
Just checked the qemu guest agent logs on the VMs I have.

Roughly every 30 minutes qemu guest agent is running the command "bash -c ps -eo pcpu,args"
$ sudo journalctl -u qemu-guest-agent.service | grep 'guest-exec called'
<snip...>
Jul 25 19:01:59 kvmXXXX qemu-ga[704]: info: guest-exec called: "bash -c ps -eo pcpu,args"

.

@PrepaidHost said:
First of all, we take the feedback from the community seriously.

Our automated process monitoring system ...

...

The monitoring system worked by querying running processes via the qemu-guest-agent at regular intervals.

imo this was a bigger problem than their price increase or some AI slop. I know that most LET users care more about pricing than anything else...

@PrepaidHost said:

Our automated process monitoring system was originally introduced to detect and mitigate massive intentional abuse, especially related to outbound mail spam. Over the past months, we’ve seen significant volumes of deliberate mass mailing activity

Notice that @PrepaidHost tried to play it off as though they're just preventing spam, yet they were including compilers (and who knows what else) in their scans

I would never have anything to do with this company.

totally_not_banned · July 20

@tzuli said:
I would never have anything to do with this company.

Agreed. I mean the reason this works is kind of on the user (always install from iso, netboot, diskimage, whatever and ideally encrypt your disk while your at it or if that's really too much work at least remove shit like qemu-guest-agent) but peeking into users systems is still a major breach of trust in my opinion. If it's a single user system there might even be sensitive data among the dumped commandlines...

If spam is such a big problem just block port 25. Most users serious about mailing will use an external service anyways and if not even just requiring an explanation via ticket before unblocking the port will likely reduce abuse by a lot.

Hell, they could even setup a local relay for clients to use and keep port 25 blocked entirely. In my opinion that would be a very neat solution. They get to monitor mail volume and users don't have to deal with setting up a MTA. It could pretty much be made into a feature.

tzuli · July 20

You don't accidentally match processes like gcc or qbittorrent-nox. And it would be obviously be an ineffective way to prevent spam. The thought of relying on a simple "match name of evil executable" to prevent anything malicious is laughable. To be blunt, I think their entire explanation was bullshit

totally_not_banned · July 20

@tzuli said:
You don't accidentally match processes like gcc or qbittorrent-nox. And it would be obviously be an ineffective way to prevent spam. The thought of relying on a simple "match name of evil executable" to prevent anything malicious is laughable. To be blunt, I think their entire explanation was bullshit

I don't always spam but when i spam i'll 100% use a torrent client

zed · July 20

lol wtf

forest · July 20

@tzuli said: That means they are actively scanning your running processes

You don't mask qemu-guest-agent? That's on you then.

forest · July 20

@totally_not_banned said:

@tzuli said:
You don't accidentally match processes like gcc or qbittorrent-nox. And it would be obviously be an ineffective way to prevent spam. The thought of relying on a simple "match name of evil executable" to prevent anything malicious is laughable. To be blunt, I think their entire explanation was bullshit

I don't always spam but when i spam i'll 100% use a torrent client

You aren't sending email spam using gcc? Pleb.

rpqu · July 20

@forest said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@tzuli said:
You don't accidentally match processes like gcc or qbittorrent-nox. And it would be obviously be an ineffective way to prevent spam. The thought of relying on a simple "match name of evil executable" to prevent anything malicious is laughable. To be blunt, I think their entire explanation was bullshit

I don't always spam but when i spam i'll 100% use a torrent client

You aren't sending email spam using gcc? Pleb.

Should have use cat

tzuli · July 20

@tzuli said:
it would be obviously be

damnit... I should've had AI write this

plumberg · July 21

@emgh said:
ai slop

Father ballz

nghialele · July 21

@plumberg said:

@emgh said:
ai slop

Father ballz

totally_not_emgh

Astro · July 21

@Alyx said:
Thanks for the wall of text generated by AI.
This really shows how much you value your customers.

Has this become the new way of just shitting on posts? I get that he used AI to write it but the ask seems reasonable to me. Business aren't charities. People who don't like are free to to pick another provider.

zed · July 21

@Astro said: People who don't like are free to to pick another provider.

that's a great point, everybody paying attention?

stable_genius · July 21

@Astro said:
People who don't like are free to to pick another provider.

Yes they are free to pick another one, are they not? That's a good point, they certainly are!

Astro · July 21

Its just a cop out day at LET it seems

JasonM · July 22

@tentor said: Tokens might be expensive but the talk isn't for sure

agree

forest · July 26

@Astro said:

@Alyx said:
Thanks for the wall of text generated by AI.
This really shows how much you value your customers.

Has this become the new way of just shitting on posts? I get that he used AI to write it but the ask seems reasonable to me. Business aren't charities. People who don't like are free to to pick another provider.

Whether or not the ask seems reasonable, the two problems are that they're:

Complaining about how AI datacenters are causing the RAM price increase while being part of the problem themselves
Using an AI to write for them, rather than just using something like Google Translate to translate

By creating an obnoxious wall of text to explain a price hike, they're essentially saying "we're increasing prices also fuck you". If they were just increasing prices, they wouldn't get nearly as big a backlash.

maxysoft · July 31

edit. my bad. solved the issue by changing the browser...

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[Prepaid-Host] Price adjustment on older promo root servers — effective 1 Aug 2026

What's changing

The why — and I'll pre-empt the obvious objection

Will you drop prices again when RAM/NAND normalises?

Comments

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In this Discussion

[Prepaid-Host] Price adjustment on older promo root servers — effective 1 Aug 2026

What's changing

The why — and I'll pre-empt the obvious objection

Will you drop prices again when RAM/NAND normalises?

Comments