Back in March, we featured our first offer in Albania since 2016 – a nine year stretch.  It was shared by AVS ISP, a neat husband-and-wife team company:

We are a Husband and Wife team. An American Husband and Albanian Wife. The wife handles the business side of things, and the husband everything technical. We are also looking to bring in family and friends to help with support tickets, issues, etc. We made be a small team, but we think we can make a difference and grow over time. The best thing about us being a smaller team? You can deal with us directly. No huge corporate polices. If you have an issue, you can tell us, and we can try to accommodate as long as it doesn’t effect other users. Not satisfied with something? We can help. Having trouble paying on-time and need a few more days? We can give extensions. Need a custom plan? Let us know and we can set it up. Non-standard setup with custom ISO and specs? No problems. These are things big companies can’t or aren’t willing to do usually.

They’ve returned with some lifetime offers…with a twist: there’s only one for each size, and they’re not restocking them.

Intriguing!

Now, we’ve covered lifetime offers in the past, and our mixed feelings about them.  All too often, providers will sell a bunch of them and then after they’ve got the cash, realize that providing decades of service for no further renumeration is no fun at all.

But in this case, AVS is just offering one small, one medium, and one large.

As a thank you to your users, we have 3 lifetime VMs we’d like to offer to your users. (1 from each of our VM sizes). They’re the same price as yearly, but are for lifetime instead (truly lifetime, we’ll help them get it all setup and then forget they even exist – unless they contact for support of course – in which case we’d be happy to help them!)

In this case, the offer shouldn’t cut into their operating expenses much, because it’s only 3 VMs.  Yet AVS benefits from the publicity this unusual offer is sure to give them.

Specs are the same as in our original offering – the lifetime ones are the Debian by default, but a simple ticket and any OS at all can be installed. We had a customer yesterday ask for CentOS 7 that is EOL — got it setup for them with an additional /28 as ordered without issues – including updating repos to use the vault/historical archived ones). Also had one client that wanted Windows 7 for some reason – also wasn’t an issue to get that installed for them.

BGP sessions are of course available with no additional fees (for their own ASN, not downstreaming / no as-set filtering).

Lifetime VPS Offers

Remember, there’s only one of each!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.