[ralferoo]

They tend to do promotions, typically only valid for 24h and only advertised on certain forums like LET, a couple of times per year - typically at least around their company anniversary date or Black Friday.

There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.

[Forgeties79]

> There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.

I don’t understand the logic here so I’m going to assume I’m being obtuse. Doesn’t that just mean that’s their standard price? Why or how would you ever pay more?

[ralferoo]

Yeah, I kind of agree in the latter case. Black Friday deals often have lower priority support etc.

I guess with Servarica, they have their standard deals, but for Black Friday deals are generally thin margins, but still enough to cover costs. Typically every year, they have special deals that are a bit different to their previous offerings. As a result, some people prefer the previous deals, some prefer the new ones, so they keep them all going. It's a bit unusual. They've also got a few interesting deals, like start with N TB and it grows a bit every day. If you keep these more than about 3-4 years, these are probably better value for money, but I think you're paying too much in the first few years. It's interesting if your primary use case is incremental backups.

Hosthatch's deals are a bit different as they're usually preorders and at almost cost with basically minimal support, whereas they keep their normal stuff in stock and have higher support levels.

I should also add that I've not personally used Servarica, even though they look interesting - just because they only have a Canadian datacenter. I have 4 Hosthatch servers spread all over the globe so that I have more redundancy in my backups. I only buy them when they have deals, assuming I don't miss them as they're only for 24h.