When a few years ago I saw the announcement of a new cloud provider, which told about service will be available for lifetime after paying once - I realized that this business model won't be success. But bought a few servers.
So today, when I received a letter saying that I must pay $9 or my servers would be closed, I wasn't surprised.
As you may already know, CloudatCost has updated their Terms of Service.
Within this update, there has been an amendment to section 9, Account information,billing and payment.
The amendment is as follows:
9.18 Customers with a onetime payment service are subject to an annual maintenance fee of $9 which will be invoiced 12 months after using our service. This does not apply to users that have a monthly paid service. This Maintenance fee will ensure proper hardware upgrades and maintenance to reduce degradation of onetime payment services.
Below are some common questions that we have been receiving about this update.
Q: Why am I being charged this yearly fee, my packages all say one time?
A: This fee is not the same as your package setup fee, which is why it is not affected by the number of packages that you have purchased. This is a maintenance fee, that will go towards hardware replacement, as well as assist with the purchase of new hardware, which will improve performance and reliability.
Q: What benefit do I have as a customer of having this fee in place?
A: The revenue generated from this fee will be going towards hardware replacement, as well as additional hardware to expand our infrastructure. The largest benefit will be seen by customers with multiple packages. For a small fee from their investment of CloudatCost resources, they will see an improvement in system performance and reliability. Customers with only a single Developer CloudPRO1, may view the cost to benefit ratio as unprofitable, but the same benefits will be seen among all accounts regardless of size.
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Yes, $9/year is a very small price. But is this service worth it? At the moment they offer the worst service that I've ever seen.
