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Hostslick Exits VPS Market: Your Golden Opportunity to Capture Clients
That's right—I received an email from HostSlick today confirming that they are exiting the VPS market.
I subsequently opened a support ticket, and they confirmed that they will no longer be pursuing their VPS business.
For other VPS providers, this presents an excellent opportunity to capture their user base.
Key Recommendations:
When launching VPS products for the Netherlands region, the focus should be on offering exceptional value for money combined with a lenient DMCA policy. These were precisely the two factors that drew me to purchase their VPS services in the first place:
High-performance Netherlands VPS products.
Netherlands VPS products featuring large storage capacities.
Support for a friendly and lenient DMCA policy.
These three points are crucial and constitute their unique selling proposition; after all, the standard Netherlands VPS market is already saturated with numerous providers.
Comments
A few thoughts:
I once read a true story: The VPS provider racknerd.com was reportedly founded in its early days by an employee of QuadraNet. Today, they have outgrown QuadraNet. As for QuadraNet, it is said to primarily sell dedicated servers to business owners at slightly higher prices (which seems closely related to your future business plan). Furthermore, QuadraNet owns its own data centers and has excellent hardware infrastructure. So why did it eventually get overtaken by Racknerd? In my view, it ultimately comes down to differences in target audiences. Racknerd’s users prioritize value for money, resulting in a lower average order value; while QuadraNet’s users have a higher average order value, it’s well known that a high average order value typically implies a lower conversion rate. Currently, Racknerd’s market share has far surpassed that of QuadraNet. Later, QuadraNet was actually acquired by Edge Centres.
I’ve also observed another case: I’ve been using cloudcone.com’s products since 2019. Its highly cost-effective VPS services ultimately led to its acquisition by Edge Centres.
This year, I’ve noticed major companies like ovh.com frequently promoting their VPS and dedicated server products. As you can see, these products offer exceptional value for money:
https://eco.ovhcloud.com/asia/?at_medium=display
Logically speaking, shouldn’t these large companies be aiming for higher profits by selling high-end servers?
I later realized that lowering the barrier to entry to attract more users is actually the best strategy. This is why companies like RackNerd, CloudCone, and OVH offer VPS services: they use lower prices and better value for money to attract more users, some of whom will eventually convert into high-value customers. The logic goes like this: if you sell a server for $100 a month but have only one customer, while someone else sells it for $1 and has 100 customers, then based on customer lifetime value, the future revenue generated by those 100 customers far exceeds that of a single customer. The reason is that among those 100 customers, 10 might convert into high-value customers who go on to purchase your dedicated servers, CDN services, and more. Furthermore, once you have 100 customers, wouldn’t your bargaining power be much stronger when purchasing servers or leasing data center space? This is exactly what RackNerd is doing. At this point, Quadranet might feel quite frustrated—despite its higher pricing for dedicated servers, it simply cannot compete with RackNerd in terms of user base, and was ultimately forced to sell.
Keep up the good work, VPS providers! This is the best opportunity to capture market share. There are still opportunities in this market right now.
When I purchased their VPS product in 2025, I was primarily drawn to two unique selling points: their lenient DMCA policy and the availability of large-storage VPS instances hosted in the Netherlands. Had it not been for these specific features, I certainly would not have chosen their service. At the time, the annual price of €45 was genuinely appealing—especially considering it was also DMCA-friendly.
CPU - 2 vCore - XEON E5-2680v4
RAM - 2GB
Bandwidth - 2.5Gbit - 10TB (after 10TB reached, 100mbit,50up/50down)
Disk Space - 3TB Storage
Port Speed - 2.5Gbit
IPv4 Addresse(s) - 1
Operating System - Linux
Location - Netherlands (EU)
Datacenter - HostSlick, NETHERLANDS
Virtualization - KVM
45€/YEAR
Hi,
thats all in general nice. The problem is that those prices fits to the past. Not to the present. Hardwareprices drastically increased. While a server with 3 TB storage for 45 EUR would be something that could be offered and make some money in the past, with hardware prices in 2026 if you have to provide now this 3 TB to a customer this 45 EUR would be loss.
So as long as you would not buy the hardware from @HostSlick together with the customers, while i assume he/she would not let go this hardware too cheap, taking over this contracts will turn out to be a trap for providers who want to make money - and not loose it.
That was just their 2025 plan; they only offered regular HDD.
The discussion here isn't about the same plan, but about the operating model.
If you don't understand the operating model, you will indeed lose money.
For example, look at why Cloudflare offers free CDN services and still manages to be a top 10 CDN provider globally. If you followed most people's thinking, you would definitely lose money.
And have you noticed that they don't make much profit on domain renewals? When renewing a domain with Namecheap costs $17, they only charge $10. Who do you think users will choose? When enough users choose them, a certain percentage become high-net-worth paying customers, and they offer many subsequent products—that's called customer lifetime value.
Most of us in business only make one-time transactions. If customers don't use your service long-term, you can only constantly acquire new customers, which requires advertising and marketing costs, right? If your initial plan is to have customers use your service for more than 3 years, or even longer, and you provide excellent service, won't your profits increase?
Another issue you've overlooked is that if you have 10,000 customers, wouldn't you have more pricing power when purchasing server hard drives?
In fact, last year, they used users' money to purchase hard drives for that package deal, since it took them over 10 business days to set up VPSs for each user.
So what's the key point? The key point is that when you have enough users, your costs will be lower. You might wonder why OVHCloud is heavily promoting low-priced VPSs this year; they didn't have such low-priced products last year. High-end servers are clearly more profitable, right? They're actually launching low-priced products to steal customers from other vendors.
That's operational strategy.
Hi,
thank you very much for your market analyze and insights!
Probably i lack of fantasy, but maybe could you please explain to me, since i really lack to come up with a solution for this:
if selling this under your own buying price is the latest cool marketing move, do you have any idea why hostslick decided to exit this market/offers?
I mean if its the gate for the real money to offer services below your own purchase prices, why did they decide to exit this market?
First, the prices each supplier can obtain for products may vary because different vendors have different channel resources.
Second, as for why hostslick withdrew from the market, that's their own operational strategy, and I won't comment.
But in the VPS market, there are probably hundreds or even more competitors currently operating in this market. If the market itself isn't profitable, then there won't be a continuous influx of vendors, right?
I'm guessing @jackpops is an idealist undergrad/undergrad age
just make it up in volume
All of that is pretty niche though. Probably a very small percentage of the overall VPS market needs: "high performance" (latest and greatest CPUs, tons of CPU cores and RAM and/or big big clock speeds and NVMe array storage performance), "large storage" isn't a requirement for most, "Lenient DMCA policy", even less people need this.
With that said, there are no shortage of providers in the DMCA ignored / big storage / low cost market but I'd expect to either pay more (or observe a price increase in the future) or changes to their DMCA policy as the Netherlands slowly becomes less of a favorable place for that sort of thing.
High performance here doesn't necessarily mean using the best hardware configuration, but rather differentiation within a relatively competitive price and configuration, and great value for the price.
Although this is currently a niche market, I believe that is precisely what sets it apart. In the mainstream North American market, this configuration offers no particular advantages,
but when you combine large storage capacity, exceptional value for money, and comparable product specifications with DCMA, the result is a unique selling proposition.
You don’t have to cater to every customer; you just need to rank among the top ten in your niche.
For example: HostGator, which initially focused solely on web hosting;
Amazon Cloud, which specializes in cloud computing;
Cera Networks, which sells servers exclusively;
and many other small and medium-sized businesses that offer only VPS services.
Each provider has a distinct product positioning, pricing strategy, and target customer base.
greed mostly, they wanna make now BILLIONS, MILLIONS are not enuff anymore
Playing definition games may make you look smart in a seminar, a marketing gig, etc., but not here on LET, where many (prob. most) do have a quite clear understanding of high performance, and it does boil down to fastest (or at least decently fast) processor, fast RAM, fast NVMe, and fast connectivity.
Good luck trying that in the high performance niche based on you re-definition games rather that highly performant hardware and connectivity.
WOW, what a deep insight! Thanks to you we finally can understand that not all providers are the same, just with different names.
im looking for vps reseller in NL.
Llamas
Could it be that the average lowend host doesn't sit on a mountain of venture capital to burn through while chasing some kind of theoretical profit that might or might not materialize somewhere in the distant future? Being a top 10 CDN provider doesn't mean that you are actually making money after all.
Holy molly that blatant naiveness. There is a reason why low end providers quit:
low quality service, trash support...
Exactly. And those who exclude from this, subsidize low end services with a lot more pricier options. Low end is just another marketing channel to acquire customer base, maybe some of them convert to premiums. Similarly it was with free shared hosting. You offer free hosting and premium. ~0.1% converts and covers expenses. The rest is the game of patience, the longer you are in the game - the more good rep you earn and this in exchange brings more clients.
A lesson: do not expect anything from low end. No uptime, no performance, no support. You pay to play. Hosting serious stuff -> going with big boys.
there are lots of good providers here too, but mostly are low quality ! quantity over quality, they prefer to make 1 year some money and next year lose half their customers of the entire business. awesome strategy !!!!
only by scaling your infra and automated system administration(non ai, see pulsedmedia lol) you can keep up.