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if salaries and other costs also decrease yes.
DeluxHost = same quality with a deluxe price increase on first renewal.
Imagine writing books worth of hate and cry comments over a price increase of a YEARLY payment worth one hour of parking in Frankfurt..
You have never saw people fighting for $0.37 incurred in transaction fees
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/4671308/#Comment_4671308
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/4671316/#Comment_4671316
Because thanks:
That would be a very good book about principles, responsibility and the value of a gentleman's word.
You know that, I know that, I think most of us know that.
However, the text sent out is: "At the same time, the cost landscape has changed significantly: hardware resources (especially RAM and components), infrastructure, operations, and the technical work required to maintain high standards have all increased substantially.". First item in that list: hardware resources. And that to try to get support for a price increase concerning "old" customers.
That way of formulating it makes people think it's the most important one, while it's the least important one for existing customers. And I think that is one of the main reasons, amongst the promise of recurring and the strange build of (high) increase percentages.
YES, some did, more will probably do the same in the future. It took us ~3 years to reach a Terms & Conditions structure we consider stable ( they will most probably evolve in the future also, but not in big leaps as they did till now ).
This is a downside of choosing a startup, and I fully agree with those that did not like the change, but I don't have any other option then to go forward.
We also lost some good people along the way, and that’s never ideal. All I can hope is that some of them may consider coming back in the future once things stabilize.
That said, I do want to underline one important point, because it’s often misunderstood:
That, so if you think a 10-20% increase is high, you ain't seen all.... yet.
Operational costs are not directly tied to RAM or Drive prices for already-running services.
However, everything else around them is increasing rapidly:
To put things into perspective:
Stacked together, it’s very easy to see a +30–35% increase in operational costs within a single month all while margins on some services were already thin.
At that point, the choices are simple:
I’m confident we’ll see both approaches across the industry. ( I also bet more on the later option )
This is not speculation; and it’s not about taking advantage of customers; it’s about survival of both in a rapidly changing environment. Most providers will try to carry as many customers as possible through rough times, but inevitably some will leave as the new reality won’t suit everyone.
No provider wants to raise prices just to lose customers; but there are times when it becomes unavoidable.
Just look at the larger players:
Netflix, Google Workspace, and many other subscription services have all raised prices recently. Infrastructure providers are not immune to the same pressures.
Larger providers can absorb price increases more easily, while smaller players feel the pressure much sooner — but ultimately, no one is immune to these changes.
If this price increase sets a precedent, there's no guarantee they won't continue raising prices in the future. And it would set a bad precedent.
It is not just about Ram cost alone , there are other costs going up as well
evil larry will finger your bumbhole while youre sleeping to increase your senses
No they are not, thats the fun part, selling dirt cheap and running at a loss, and then upping the prices is their whole business model.
Did you also open a ticket with Netflix, Google Workspace, or your electricity provider when prices went up? or is hosting the only industry expected to freeze pricing forever?
By that logic, every subscription service that ever adjusted pricing should have gone out of business years eons ago.
Not trying to defend or anything, but I can see it coming from miles away. Those lower-spec yearly price already didn't make sense to me (too cheap with included IPv4). I work at a small scale DC (~1MW), cost of everything has increased in recent months, some significantly (inflation, ramflation, etc).
the market is so unbelievably fucked right now. a lot of newer hosting companies are better off shutting down and selling their RAM, would end up with more profit than a year of operating. Costs of rackspace and power are also insane right now. Deluxhost is just a bit of a canary in the coal mine due to their incredibly thin (or nonexistent, idk shithost economics) margin. If this keeps going for another year or 2, I can't really think of many providers here who would be able to maintain prices.
I think you've made some decent points, but this is not an apt metaphor. With those services, users don't build anything on top of them. With Netflix, if you don't like the price increase, you cancel the plan and use your dollars on some other service, or maybe another hobby. With Google Workspace, you download all of your documents and emails and move to MS, or roll your own services. They are portable models.
With hosting, if you've entered into an agreement with a provider with the expectation that the discounted rate is recurring, you're building something on top of that service that is much less portable than Netflix or Workspace. It is not nearly as easy to shift to another hosting provider.
Maybe LET needs to implement a rule that says recuring discounts must include a guarantee that the price does not change for at least X years. I have a provider who I found through LET that I would pay 5 years in advance today based on their service in the month I've been using it so far. They have a decent amount of history here as well. However, I don't want to do that because of these sorts of threads.
@deafcon — I do actually agree with part of your point.
Hosting workloads are more “sticky” than Netflix or Google Workspace, and moving them takes time and effort. That’s a fair observation, and it’s exactly why advance notice matters so much.
That said, the idea of guaranteeing fixed pricing for X years on recurring discounts runs into the same hard wall everywhere else: providers don’t control their upstream costs.
If LET could mandate that recurring discounts must include multi-year price guarantees, we’d happily forward that rule to electricity suppliers, ISPs, colocation providers, hardware vendors, tax authorities, and fuel companies — and ask them to lock pricing as well 🙂
On portability: hosting is portable, just not instant. When prices change, customers get notice, assess their options, and either adapt or move — exactly like with other subscription services. It’s not “nothing,” but it’s also not a trap or a hostage situation.
The alternative to occasional price adjustments isn’t “stable forever pricing” — it’s pretending costs haven’t changed until a provider is forced into a sudden shutdown. That’s far worse for everyone involved.
Long-term stability comes from transparency and communication, not from pretending price freezes are realistic in a volatile market.
Heck, not even governments can guarantee stable pricing — and they have millions of captive subscribers called taxpayers 🙂
Anything I do related to LET is just hobby stuff for me, but I do work in the enterprise SaaS space. We are offering our customers 3 year price locks, and our folks are way way way more sticky than anyone buying a single core VPS on LET. Make offers that provide enough margin for you to not constantly require price adjustments, or don't make offers.
I don't think I can really use this for anything, no matter the price:
This is just latest reinstall; had plenty of crashes before as well, and I did NOT make that last reboot.
@host_c - are you planning a price increase?
hallo my www.crunchyroll membership has been increased more than 300% of original price, would like to donate and waste your money in anime services?
That’s fair, but this is exactly where the SaaS vs. infrastructure distinction really matters.
Enterprise SaaS with 3-year price locks works because:
margins are significantly higher (often an order of magnitude higher),
cost structures are far more predictable, and
upstream dependencies (power, space, hardware, transit) are either abstracted away or amortized very differently.
Those are multi-million (or billion) dollar companies. They absorb cost swings in ways that a typical LET provider running a few colocation sites with a handful of racks simply cannot.
Infrastructure hosting doesn’t have those luxuries. Power, colocation, transit, taxes, and labor are direct, variable, externally controlled costs. When they move, they move immediately, sometimes within the next billing cycle, regardless of how conservative the original pricing was.
In SaaS, you’re selling software with marginal cost approaching zero at scale.
In hosting, you’re selling physical resources with hard cost floors; electricity alone can wipe out even “safe” margins overnight, particularly in the EU, where energy pricing and taxation behave very differently compared to the US.
Could providers bake in enough margin to absorb multi-year shocks? In theory, yes. In practice, that usually means either:
pricing that’s uncompetitive in normal market conditions, or
reserving those guarantees for large, long-term enterprise contracts, not small, commodity VPS services.
So the realistic options are:
price aggressively and accept that adjustments may happen, or
price conservatively enough for multi-year locks and lose most of the market to providers willing to take more risk.
Neither approach is wrong, they simply target different customers and risk profiles.
SaaS and commodity hosting may look similar on the surface, but the economics underneath are fundamentally different.
PS: Did I mention that WHMCS raised prices again? No 60 day notice, no heads-up; just a new invoice that’s roughly ~15% higher than the previous months.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about $15, $20, or even $200 per month. That’s not the issue. The issue is predictability, or actually the total lack of it.
If upstream vendors can apply increases with effectively no advance notice, it becomes very difficult for providers downstream to plan, buffer, or “price perfectly” in advance. This is simply how the industry behaves right now, whether we like it or not.
And that’s exactly the point many are missing.
So it seems like in the server world, people just increasing prices using the excuse of "increased prices of doing business".
Funny enough no one mentions or wonders if these prices are increasing due to greed or hunger for profit and instead just citing some random reason.
Either whole thing will collapse and there won't be enough demand at the end of the day as it simply won't worth. Or only handful of people will be able to afford to even basic things.
Time will tell
To note, I am not saying this regards to specific provider.
Isn't this the very reason why you have a portion for opex and for "in case shit happens"?
I'm not a business woman by any means, I do not own nor have I ever ran one... But you set aside $$$ for exactly this reason no matter what business you are as anything can happen at any time and you need that safety net.
Let them increase prices while many salaries don't increase. Who knows, maybe some other rich people will order the low-end services. Nobody knows the future.
What I do know: I cancelled Netflix, Spotify, ditched Yahoo, thinking about Prime now. Meanwhile: long live the torrents and the dark web!
I don't know about your cost structure, but let's assume 7% increase across the board, but it will still be 7% increase. Not 30-35%.
If global inflation is at 30-35% yoy, we would be facing global depression, because the large subset of the economy is practically zombies.
However, that change if we viewed the company "wealth" based on the unit of core, ram and storage. A clever merchant would have to consider the cost of acquisition, so they could bought enough stock of merchandise to be leased the next day, and preferably more stock (wealth) than the last day.
Therefore, the merchant would have to increase the price of lease to maintain availability of stock. In this case, the 30-35% is realistic because RAM prices has increased by multiple times
Good point,
And regarding the prices increase, some will do it to cover expenses, some will be just for greed, there is no way to tell them apart.
This is not the end, it is like this since the age of dawn.
That’s a fair point and yes, responsible operators do keep reserves for unexpected events.
That said, those reserves are meant to absorb short-term shocks, not to permanently subsidize services that have become structurally unprofitable due to sustained cost increases.
Some providers can wait 3–6 months, or even longer, before making changes. Others can’t. But regardless of size, the moment a business starts burning reserves to “wait it out”, management has to start thinking about the next move.
There’s no universal rule here. Every company/individual has a different tolerance for how long it’s willing or able to operate at a loss before making a decision. At some point, continuing to burn cash stops being prudence and starts being negligence.
That threshold is different for everyone, but it exists for everyone.
Even on a personal level, the same principle applies. Someone might stay in a lower-paying job because it’s close to home, offers flexibility, or provides other non-financial benefits. But over time, as circumstances change, most people will start looking for alternatives.
It’s the same logic here — just with different metrics, constraints, and tools.
EDIT:
@rpqu
A rational operator has to consider replacement cost, not historical cost. To remain viable, a provider must be able to:
If the cost to acquire that stock has increased significantly, then lease pricing must follow — otherwise availability and sustainability disappear.
I don’t know where you’re located, but for context: we’ve effectively been in a global economic slowdown / recessionary environment for close to two years now, and many of these pressures are cumulative, not sudden.
Some price increases are driven by external factors. Some aren’t (speculation). The difficult part is telling the difference, but when the numbers stop making sense, the rational response isn’t denial.
Sometimes the sane decision is simply to cut losses and move on.
Some businesses will adapt and survive.
Some won’t.
That’s not unique to hosting, it’s just how markets, and life, work.
Cheers!
So... what is your next move? How much can you wait? Are you also going to increase prices across the board?
For list-priced products available for new orders, pricing adjustments have already been applied.
For already commissioned services on Xeon Scalable Gen 2, pricing will remain unchanged for the time being — I have no intention of modifying those. ( We have reserves for thoes in case we need them
)
Anything related to the E5-v4 platform is a separate subject altogether. That discussion will happen in our own topic, not here, and not today.
wow host_c have so much He patience
to write all of them comments
i wish you don't need to increase your price in +1000328 year
He is exactly why I have services with his company.
He actively gives a shit, is willing to talk quite openly about the business and the mistakes. He's humble too, he doesn't talk down to anyone.
Thank you again for taking the time to talk and explain. I hope people take the things you say as lessons.