Cloudatcost and Their Bait-and-Switch Scam “Lifetime” VPS

When Cloudatcost launched, they where attempting to shake up the web hosting market by offering VPS servers that users only had to pay for once, rather than monthly or yearly. Of cause, many people immediately knew such a service was never going to be sustainable in the long term but as people like to get a good deal, the service soon became very popular.

The Crappy Service from Cloudatcost

The VPS servers provided by Cloudatcost have pretty much have had a reputation for being crap, with the following list of common issues not being in any way complete

• A network so bad that it become well known for its’ high packet loss.
• Storage for VMs would often be set to read only if under heavy use.
• Disk space being incorrect in VMs (aka, always having 10GB allocated).
• Incredibly slow CPU (think oversold).

And to make all of this even worse, Cloudatcost in the past has been known to be backdoors into their customers VMs, which is a fantastic way of compromising their users security.

The Bait and Switch Scam Cloudatcost Pulled on Their Own Users

In early 2017, Cloudatcost decided that they wanted more money from their users who supposedly paid for a “lifetime” VPS, so they decided to add a $9/year “maintenance fee”. This fee did not appear to even be well communicated to users as many people only found out about this when logging into the Cloudatcost panel, or even worse only found out when they received an invoice.

Of cause, as this scam was pulled out years after a lot of people would have pushed a VPS from Cloudatcost most people where left without a VPS or the money they originally spent on their so-called “lifetime” service.

And of cause all those cancellations from scammed users mean that Cloudatcost has some spare IPV4 that is can sell to other organisation.

The New Lifetime Offers from Cloudatcost

On the 31st May 2019, Cloudatcost announced a new series of VPS servers (CloudPro v3), starting at $99 “One-time” for the 2GB Ram package but I would never recommend that anyone “buys” any of the new package as you can never trust a company that has in the past scammed its’ customers.

Published: 3rd June 2019