Two racks in Frankfurt, a handful in Amsterdam, a pricing spreadsheet and a rule about what to do when the spreadsheet says no. That is CheapServ on the day this blog starts. This first post is a short explanation of why we built a hosting company in a market that already has thousands, what we promised ourselves it would not become, and how you can hold us to it.
The itch
We had been buying servers for our own projects for a decade and kept meeting the same three annoyances. Prices that looked cheap on the front page and grew with every checkbox. “In stock” that meant a three-day wait and an apology. And a payment page that wanted a card, a billing address and, increasingly, a photograph of our passports, for a $5 virtual machine. None of these is hard to avoid. They persist because avoiding them is slightly less profitable, and because the customers who mind are a minority. We are that minority, and we decided to build the host we wanted to buy from.
Three rules
Price by a rule, not by a meeting
Every plan is priced at 20% below the cheapest credible competitor for the same class of hardware, re-checked monthly. If we cannot find a credible reference for a configuration, we do not sell that configuration. The rule removes the temptation to charge what the market will bear; it also removes the sales call.
Say “sold out” when we are
The stock count on every plan is the number of machines actually racked and free at that minute. When it says three, there are three; when it says sold out, ordering is disabled rather than queued. A server you can order is a server that boots in under a minute, which is the only definition of “in stock” we find honest.
Crypto only, from day one
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and Tether, no cards, no bank transfers. No chargebacks means no fraud tax passed on to honest customers, no card processor means no processor deciding what we may host, and no identity documents means the passport stays in the drawer. We wrote up the reasoning in more detail on the pricing page; the short version is that the payment method is part of the price.
What we are starting with
- KVM virtual servers in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, five sizes, all on NVMe, from $3.29 a month.
- Dedicated servers on Ryzen and EPYC, pre-racked, imaged in under a minute.
- A control panel that does the things a panel should do (reinstall, rescue, console, snapshots, reverse DNS) and nothing that needs a support ticket to explain.
- A status page that measures us from outside and never forgets an incident.
No GPU servers yet, no Windows, no sites outside Europe. Each of those will come when we can do it under the three rules, and not before.
What this blog is for
Engineering notes, mostly: how the provisioning works, what we measured, what broke and what we changed. Occasionally a launch. Never a “top ten reasons to choose us” post; if the reasons are good, the pricing page states them in one line each.
If something on the site does not match what this post promises, that is a bug, and a ticket saying so is the most useful thing you can send us. Welcome aboard.