“Lifetime Behind a Paywall?” is a question that Zap Hosting recently asked its customers. Only it wasn’t asking. It was telling.
Zap Hosting sold lifetime hosting offers, but now if you want to keep using them, you need a “Zap-X Pass”. What is a “Zap-X Pass”? A monthly fee.
They explain it all in a super-cringey AI-voiced video, but I’ll save you four minutes: if you want to use your lifetime server, you need to pay for it every month.
They go through quite some mental gymnastics to explain it all. Your lifetime server is “locked” until you decide to pay for the pass, and then it’s “unlocked” while you pay.
Of course, when your server is unlocked, the IP address can change and it’s not clear if all the disk is truly persistent, so…what’s the difference between them holding a “locked” server for you and just spinning up a fresh VM when you request one? Hmmm. Sounds like normal monthly hosting to me.
Their reasoning for all this is the rising cost of electricity, components, etc. And that is certainly a real thing. But these are supposed to be lifetime sales. In theory, someone could buy and run for 50 years, right? Regardless of the vicissitudes of life, disruptions in the global order, whatever may come – the service is prepaid.
Instead, the first time there’s a hiccup in the cost model, Zap Hosting discontinues the service and introduces a monthly fee. One might suspect they didn’t think their lifetime deal through.
Of course, anyone who does think it through will never offer such deals – or sign up for them.
My advice on lifetime deals is to evaluate the cost over a very short time frame. If someone offers you a lifetime deal for $X, and $X is roughly what you’d pay for a year’s worth of service, and the company has a good track record in our community, then maybe it’s a good deal. You can’t get too badly burned, and if they go under after 12 months, you got your money’s worth. But never plunk down a lot of money with the expectation that something is going to last for decades.
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.
Leave a Reply