POLL: OVH IPv4 Pricing Apocalypse! If Your Provider Begs, What Will You Say?

The LowEnd community was rocked today by news that OVH is substantially increasing IPv4 prices.

The OVH blog has a table showing the impact for different IP block sizes, which is strange since the pricing is the same whether you’re buying a single IPv4 or a /24:

• Old price: € 2.00 setup
• New price: € 1.50 monthly

Wow.

So if you’re a small VPS shop who buys your IPs from OVH, they’ve just added € 1.50 a month to the cost of each and every VPS.

Think about that.  This isn’t a new datacenter fee or regulatory cost that you can spread out over your customer base.  Fixed costs you can essentially reduce to nothing by selling more, but this is a new per-unit cost and it’s not small.  If you were selling VPSes for €18/year or less, that is no longer viable.  If you want to eat, you’re updating your WHMCS to increase prices by € 1.50/month.

If you can.

See, that’s where this will get interesting and ugly.  There’s a fair number of providers who sell annual plans.  If you sold a bunch of servers with €12/year plans, you’re facing doom unless you’ve got the pockets to ride out a lot of pain.

So here’s the question: imagine there’s a small provider who sold you a VPS for something like €18/year or even €36/year or more.  What if the came to you and said:

We have a black swan apocalyptic price increase from our key supplier.  There’s no way we can absorb the cost.  We realize we made a deal with you and you deserve the service you paid for, but this is an extinction-level event for us.  Can we make you a new offer we both can live with?

How would you react?  Let us know in this poll:

Related Posts:

Two Weeks to Black Friday: Prices You Won't See Until Next Black Friday!

Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About BLACK FRIDAY? Nope!

10,000 Benchmarks! The Future of ServerVerify: Interview with Jon Biloh

Summer is Here! Avoid the Nightmare of Buying From a Summer Host

Saturday Deep Lore: Announcing the LowEndTalk Forum!

Vibe-Drafting IETF Proposals is Now a Thing (The IPv8 Proposal)

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, 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, raindog308 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, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, 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.