The €4 plan, and why it is gone
We sold one for two years. Deleting it cost us a quarter of falling revenue, removed nine out of ten support tickets and almost every abuse report we had ever received. It remains the single best decision in the history of this company, and it is not close.
What happened in 2021
Revenue fell for one quarter. The queue emptied inside a month.
The cheap tier was a quarter of our customers and nearly all of our work. Abuse reports came almost exclusively from it, because a disposable instance is worth exactly what it costs to replace, and the people using ours for outbound nuisance had no reason to be careful.
Support was worse. A four-euro subscription cannot fund an eleven-minute median response, so the choice was to answer badly at the bottom or to answer badly everywhere. We removed the plan instead, and every number we care about improved within two quarters.
Abuse reports fell by ninety percent
Not because our terms changed, but because the economics did. Someone paying €29 a month for a real machine behaves like a person with something to lose.
The support queue emptied
Nine tickets in ten had come from the cheapest tier, usually about performance that was working exactly as sold. Removing the plan removed the argument.
The fleet got faster to run
Dense, oversubscribed nodes are the ones that page you at night. Every node in production now runs allocations that were counted once, and capacity planning became arithmetic rather than forecasting.
What sub-five-euro actually contains
A cheap plan is not a scam. It is a coherent product with its costs pushed into the places a specification sheet does not describe.
A fraction of a core, with an overdraft
The vCPU is a scheduling share, oversubscribed against eight to twenty neighbours. It is genuinely fast for two seconds and genuinely slow in the eleventh minute.
Amortised silicon
Hardware bought years ago earns its keep at this price point, so expect chips two or three generations back. Single-threaded work pays that difference on every request.
A shared gigabit, at best
Ports are shared across the rack and traffic allowances are measured in a terabyte or two, after which you are throttled or invoiced. Neither is unreasonable at the price.
Null-routing instead of filtering
Scrubbing capacity is expensive and cannot be spread across four-euro subscriptions. When an attack arrives, the cheapest and only realistic response is to drop your address for a few hours.
Support that has to be cheap
Community forums, a ticket queue measured in days, and a knowledge base doing most of the work. That is the honest cost structure of a plan priced under a sandwich.
Cost per unit of work
Price per month is the wrong comparison. Price per unit of work you can actually finish is the one that decides anything.
| A €4 burstable plan | R-4 at €29 | |
|---|---|---|
| Cores | One shared vCPU, baseline a fraction of a core | Four dedicated Zen 5 cores |
| Memory | One gigabyte, no ECC anywhere on the platform | 16 GB of DDR5 |
| Storage | Twenty to forty gigabytes on shared drives | 200 GB of Gen4 NVMe, mirrored, with a hot spare per node |
| Port | Shared, typically one gigabit | Ten gigabits, dedicated |
| Traffic | One or two terabytes, then throttled or billed | Unmetered under a published fair-use figure |
| Under attack | Null-routed until it stops | Up to 12 Tbit/s of filtering, permanently in path |
| Support | A forum and a queue | 11 minute median first response, at any hour |
| Sustained single-thread | Decays to the baseline | Constant |
| Eight of them | About €32 for eight fractional cores | €29 for four real ones |
When a cheap plan is the correct purchase
Buying dedicated cores for an idle process is not prudence. If the workload fits in a gigabyte and sleeps most of the day, paying us seven times more buys headroom you will never touch.
We mean this literally. Several jobs should not be bought from us.
Learning
A machine to break, reinstall and break again. There is no argument for spending €29 a month on somewhere to practise iptables rules.
Tunnels, bouncers and small relays
An IRC bouncer, a personal VPN endpoint, a tiny mail relay. These are measured in kilobits and megabytes, and a fractional core is the right size of tool.
Cron runners and probes
Something that wakes up, works for four seconds and sleeps again. The burstable model is priced precisely for this shape of load, and it is the cheaper answer.
A hobby with a hard ceiling
If the project has to cost less than a coffee a month, buy the cheap plan and ship the thing. Shipping on modest hardware beats not shipping on excellent hardware.
The consolidation arithmetic
The interesting comparison is rarely one against one. Most people arriving here are running five or six small instances that grew one at a time.
Six cheap instances at €5 come to €30 a month for six fractional cores, six operating systems to patch, six sets of firewall rules and six things to notice when one of them stops. One R-8 at €54 gives you eight dedicated Zen 5 cores, 32 GB of DDR5 and 400 GB of NVMe, on a single machine with one attack surface.
On an annual term that R-8 works out at about €37.80 a month, and on a two-year term about €35.10. Somewhere in that comparison the cheap fleet stops being cheap, and the deciding factor is usually your own time rather than the invoice.
If you are unsure which side of the line you fall on, send support the workload and the current instance count. Where consolidation would not pay, we will say so.
Questions
No. Bringing it back would mean overselling cores again, and every problem we removed in 2021 would return with it, in the same order and at the same speed.
R-4 at €29 a month: four dedicated Zen 5 cores, 16 GB of DDR5, 200 GB of Gen4 NVMe, a ten gigabit port and one IPv4 address. That is the floor, at every one of the 34 sites.
Not as such. There is a seven day refund with no reason required on a first order, which is functionally a trial with a real machine at the end of it instead of a sandbox.
Yes. Thirty percent on an annual term and thirty-five percent on two years, applied to the monthly rate, so an R-8 falls from €54 to about €37.80 or €35.10. The refund window is unchanged either way.
Twenty-nine euro, and nothing shared
Four Zen 5 cores that nobody else is scheduled on, in any of thirty-four cities. If it turns out your workload never needed them, the refund takes seven days and one message.