Signs a hosting offer is too good to be true
An offer should worry you not because it is cheap, but because the arithmetic does not close. Addresses, hardware, transit and staffed people each carry a floor cost that nobody can sell below and still stay in business. When a price sits far under that floor, the difference is being recovered somewhere you have not been shown, and the useful question is not "is this a scam" but "where is the recovery". Learn the four floors and you can price any offer yourself instead of memorising a list of bad actors.
The four floors under every hosting price
- Addresses. IPv4 space is finite and changes hands at market rates. A provider handing you many distinct ranges has either tied up capital buying them or is paying a recurring lease. Either way the cost per address per month is real and does not fall to nothing.
- Hardware and power. A machine takes rack space, draws power, and gets replaced on a cycle. That cost is divided by the number of accounts sharing the box, so the main lever for cutting it is density: more accounts per server.
- Bandwidth. Transit is bought in committed volume. Anything sold as uncapped is priced against an assumption about average consumption, not peak.
- People. Someone who can reassign an address or reboot a node at three in the morning draws a salary in whatever country they sit in. Overnight coverage costs more per account than a queue drained once a day.
Undercut those by a wide margin and one of them has quietly been reduced. That is not automatically dishonest. It just needs to be disclosed, and often is not.
Patterns worth questioning
| Pattern | What has to be true | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited storage, traffic or sites | An undisclosed limit exists in the acceptable use terms, usually written as a behaviour rather than a number. | What consumption level triggers a conversation, and what is the first action taken: throttle, suspension, or an upgrade quote? A provider who names a threshold is selling a known quantity. |
| Addresses called dedicated but priced like shared | Either the margin is thin by design, or "dedicated" means only that no other customer is on it while provider services still answer there. | Does anything else resolve on this address, including panels and mail relays? How many distinct second and third octets across the whole allocation? |
| Round the clock expert support at a self-serve price | Nights are covered by a thin rota, an outsourced tier, or nobody with permissions. | Who is on shift overnight, what are they authorised to do without escalating, and what were the measured response times last month rather than the published target? |
| Renewal far above the introductory term | The first term is a customer acquisition cost, recovered over the second and third. | Put the renewal figure in writing before ordering, confirm it covers the same resources, and price the exit: notice period, export format, refund rules. |
When a low price is simply real
Cheap is not proof of anything. Genuine efficiencies exist: owning an allocation outright instead of leasing it, running hardware that is fully depreciated but adequate, operating in one dense location rather than funding a global footprint, or automating provisioning so fewer tickets are ever opened. Three questions separate real efficiency from a gap you will pay for later.
- What specifically makes this cheaper? A real answer names a mechanism. "We run lean" is not a mechanism.
- What did you give up to get there? Every genuine efficiency has a tradeoff the provider can describe without flinching.
- Which of the four floors does this price not include? Older hardware, thinner overnight cover and a single region are all defensible when stated up front.
An offer that answers all three concretely is usually honest and cheap. An offer that answers none of them is cheap for a reason you will discover on renewal day.
Work out what you actually need first in sizing and selection, compare the shortlist against the rest of buying decisions, and if a quote you have received does not add up, send us the numbers and we will tell you which floor it is missing.
Still not sure which way to go?
Tell us what you are building. If it needs less than you think, we will say so.