Complaint Review: Cloud At Cost

Cloud at Cost converted their older servers to a "lifetime" service model as part of an effort to gain new sales.

This loss leader program is similar to the completely free servers available from Google, AWS and others except that it included an up-front charge.  In my case, $28 for 4 obsolete cores in an old unreliable portion of their network that was unable to even approach the stated 99.99% uptime SLA.

After selling this "lifetime" account, the terms of service were changed to include a annual fee.  The fee works out to 32% of the original prepaid lifetime purchase in my case.  The percentage varies depending on the size of the account but was not in the original terms of service.

In addition, Cloud At Cost holds the data on these servers at ransom, not releasing the current data nor the backups until the modified fees are paid.

This has also been widely reported on sites like bbb org.