AMA — I sell offshore hosting. Ask me the things I'd rather you didn't.

Everyone here knows I sell hosting. It's in my signature and I keep it there so nobody has to wonder. What I've never done is answer questions from the other side of the desk, and a few people have asked, so here we are.

To set expectations on what I actually am: I'm a small reseller with my own hardware in two locations and resold capacity in four more. Not a datacentre. Not one of the names in the sticky. Somewhere in the middle of a market that is almost entirely made of companies like mine pretending to be bigger.

I'll answer questions about how this business actually works — abuse handling, what upstreams demand, margins, why prices are what they are, what happens internally when a complaint arrives, why some hosts fold. I'll be as specific as I can without identifying my upstreams, because that would end my business rather than just embarrass me.

I won't pitch anything in this thread and I'd ask that nobody ask me to. If you want to buy something my signature is right there and this isn't the place.

Fair warning: several of the answers are going to be less flattering to my own industry than the marketing you've read.

What happens, minute by minute, when an abuse complaint arrives?

Depends what you're running, but for a routine automated notice on my own hardware:

It arrives at an address that gets a few hundred of these a month, most of them bot-generated. It hits a filter that classifies by complainant and template. Roughly 80% never reach a human, because they're duplicates of something already classified.

The ones that reach me get about ninety seconds of attention. I check three things: is the customer's category one we accepted at signup, is this the third notice this month or the first, and is the complainant somebody who escalates. That's it. That's the whole process at my size, and I'd guess it's the whole process at most of the companies you're comparing.

The forward-or-action decision is not a moral one and it is not really a legal one either. It's a question about my upstream. If I'm on my own metal with my own transit contract, I can bin it. If that customer is on resold capacity, the notice will also reach whoever I resell from, and my tolerance is capped by theirs no matter what my website says.

That last paragraph is the one nobody in this industry puts on a landing page.

So the honest version of the product is: your policy is a claim about your upstream contracts, which the customer cannot see, verify, or be notified about when they change.

Yes. That's accurate and I'm not going to dress it up.

The only mitigations available to a customer are indirect. Ask which locations are owned versus resold — some of us will tell you, and the ones that won't have answered you. Prefer providers whose owned locations are the ones they market hardest. And treat a very cheap price in an expensive jurisdiction as evidence of reselling, because it usually is.

I lost a location in 2023 because an upstream changed hands and the new owners had a different appetite. I gave my customers eleven days' notice, which was all the notice I got, and three of them have never spoken to me since. I don't blame them.

What's the actual margin on a €5 VPS?

On owned hardware, once the box is paid off, it's good — call it 60-70% at steady occupancy. On resold, it's between 15% and 30% and one chargeback wipes out a month.

The number that matters isn't margin though, it's support cost per customer. A €5 customer who opens one ticket a month is unprofitable. A €5 customer who opens one ticket a year subsidises four of them. This is why cheap hosts have terrible support: not because they're lazy, but because the price only works if almost nobody contacts you, and every design decision follows from that.

When you see a €4 box with no phone number, no live chat and a 48-hour ticket SLA, you're not looking at a company cutting corners. You're looking at the only version of that price that can exist.

Why did the prices in this corner of the market stop falling? Everything else in hosting got cheaper every year and offshore has been flat since about 2019.

Because the cost isn't the hardware, and the hardware is the only part that got cheaper.

What you're paying for in this segment is IP space and transit relationships, and both of those got harder rather than cheaper. Clean IPv4 has been scarce and expensive for years, and if your customers get ranges listed you're buying more of it constantly. Transit providers have got much less relaxed about who they peer with, and the ones who don't care charge for not caring.

There's a third thing that nobody outside the industry sees: payment processing. Companies like mine are high-risk merchants ourselves. We get the same treatment from acquirers that our customers get, which is why so many of us are crypto-first, and why the ones that take cards are quietly paying five or six percent for the privilege.

Cheap hosting got cheaper because the marginal cost went to zero. Offshore didn't because the marginal cost was never the server.

What make you terminate a customer? Real reason, not the terms page.

Three things, in order of frequency.

They cost more than they pay. Not abuse. Tickets. Someone on a €5 plan who needs an hour of my time a week is losing me money and I will find a reason.

They put the upstream relationship at risk. One customer generating enough complaints that my transit provider emails me is an existential problem, and no customer at any price is worth it. This is the one people misread as a moral judgement about their content. It isn't. It's arithmetic about which relationship I can survive losing.

They lied at signup about the category. Not because I'm offended — because I priced and placed them wrong, and now they're on hardware where the policy doesn't cover them. If someone had told me the truth I'd have quoted them differently and probably sold them something.

Content I personally dislike is not on that list and never has been. There are two categories I won't take at any price and they're the two you'd guess, and that's a line rather than a judgement call.

Is there anything a customer does that immediately makes you think they're going to be a problem?

Asking whether we log, in the first email, before asking anything about the product. Not because the question is bad — it's a good question — but because the people who lead with it are almost always about to do something that makes the answer matter, and the people doing serious work ask about network capacity first and logging in email four.

Second one: wanting to pay for twelve months up front on a first order. Reads as commitment, is usually someone who expects to be gone in three and wants the discount before they are.

whats the weirdest thing someone has run on your boxes

A radio station. Actual streaming audio, twenty hours a day, in a language I couldn't identify, for four years. Paid on time every month, never opened a ticket, never generated a complaint. Best customer I've ever had.

He stopped in 2024 and I have no idea why.