Pay $35 once and get a VPS for life: too good to be true?

Well, if nothing else, it's only for the life of the company, not your life.

The T&Cs include several outs for them, too: http://www.cloudatcost.com/terms.php Including, but not limited to, an open clause that allows them to change the pricing any time (arguably intended for the monthly service but not so restricted in the T&Cs), 10.4 and 10.5 defines "abusive usage" and allows them to shut off VMs according to certain standards, but they get to judge them entirely, and section 20 has the standard "The terms of this Agreement, including fees, charges, features, content or any other aspects of a Service, may change at any time and without prior notice."

These are not particularly unusual clauses, which you know if you are in the habit of reading these agreements, so I'm not making any accusations that cloudatcost is trying to defraud you, or that they have any intentions at this time of not honoring the agreement. I am only pointing out that in the future they have several escape hatches, if you were for some reason counting on this service. If you are interested, go ahead and sign up, I would just account for every month after the 4th or 5th one as a nice bonus, rather than your right. Have a backup plan.

"For life" aka until the company lasts. The problem with these "for life" promises that it is hard to believe that they are going to be around longer than a year or so. If there was a big company behind such a project I would be more inclined to take it seriously.

Don't be surprised when you get the bill for the service you've never ordered: You currently have a balance of $1,568.00 due on your account with Cloud At Cost.

Invoice Description:

#40761 - CloudPRO / CloudPRO - 1 Month (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $0.00 #40761 - CloudPRO - CPU's: 100 Cores (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $300.00 #40761 - CloudPRO - RAM: 512 GB (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $768.00 #40761 - CloudPRO - Storage: 2000 GB (10/11/2015 - 11/10/2015) $500.00

Total Due: $1,568.00 Paid: $0.00 Balance Due: $1,568.00

And don't be surprised that nobody at that company is going to answer your questions (support, billing, etc).

You only get 1CPU (probably heavily limited), 512MB of RAM and 10GB of storage.

This is basically the AWS micro instance which you get for free: "AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for one year" (If you want it free for life, just create another AWS account ;)).

These instances are way to limited to run anything even remotely intensive at best you'll be able to use it as some VPN/Proxy or a small scale hosted VOIP server, but what more often than not will happen is that tons of people (hopefully) will register pay the 35$ and never use them, this is pretty much the Gym membership business model.

With thin provisioning at the fact that at best one out of 10 registered instances will actually be used they can make a huge profit, especially in the short term and considering that with how hardware scales overtime and the fact that more of the few actual users that they'll on board that would actually use that instance will drop off as time passes, it will become exponentially cheaper for them to support this type of business model with time.

This is a pretty ingenious quick cash grab if they'll manage to attract a large amount of people because 2 years down the line they'll probably could support their entire actual user base with a few RasPi's in a broom closet some where (And yes I'm aware that you can purchase much bigger VPS's from them for a much higher (onetime) cost, but the overall premise still stands)....

We have been here before. Check out the history of Textdrive and Joyent. If the company succeeds (receives funding and has to answer to investors) then it will need to eventually push these accounts out. If it doesn't succeed, then it will eventually die.

Further, as the hosting landscape changes, any sort of hosting environment may become obsolete and less useful. The first "lifetime" hosting offers from Textdrive were for shared hosting. Today, I would consider shared hosting next to worthless for my purposes. The same could happen to with VPS hosting.

Will they be upgrading these things over time? You would likely be continuing to shell out money over time to upgrade your resources.

The world of the internets is constantly changing. Anything which is "for life" doesn't reflect that. This is a marketing campaign which doesn't reflect reality.

I would rather pay the monthly fee. Cloud hosting providers are driving costs always lower. Container hosting on these clouds provide even cheaper options.

Who knows, maybe one day we'll be able to live forever through the blockchain. ;)

1) Those aren't necessarily scam offers. You probably get a very low service and performance, and the company is betting that a lot of people will subscribe to their service because of the attractiveness, but then won't use it 2) At the same time they're betting on the fact that the price of hardware and bandwidth goes down with time, making your server less and less expensive for them, and at the same time power requirements go up for applications, making the server useless for you, so you'll basically stop using it. 3) If those bets pay, they stay in business and possibly charge for other, different plans. If those bets don't pay, they close and you lose your money.

I got a "for life" server years ago. I didn't expect it to really be for my life, but I at least hoped it would be for the life of the company. It wasn't.

Oh well. At least I got a few years out of it and learned never to deal with Joyent.

I've bought a few. They work but they're slow and unreliable. The network goes down semi-regularly while they deal with spam too.

These servers have a real bad performance. I would suggest to avoid them if possible.

i was going to flag as spam like, but yeah any service that is for life especially in the cloud is too good to be true.