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In recent years, perhaps due to the crisis, economic instability and a creeping recession that is affecting many sectors, we have witnessed the consolidation and expansion of some large international players in the hosting sector. Giants with investment funds behind them, ruthless marketing strategies and a mentality that we could define without mincing words as a “serial climber of market share”.
The strategy? Simple and perverse: go at a loss. For years. With prices that defy logic, arithmetic, common sense. “Unlimited” offers for a few euros, plans that border on free, but which in reality hide a much more disturbing economic truth.
Two Economies Compared: Real vs. Financial
On one side there is the real economy: companies like ours, which provide real services, managed by real people, with living costs, salaries to pay, investments in safety, performance, assistance. The price to the customer is the result of a healthy entrepreneurial logic, where each euro must cover a sustainable value chain. A transparent, measurable mechanism, where the resources employed must generate a proportionate, not hypothetical, return. Where each individual customer is followed and managed according to a direct relationship between the service offered and the value received.
The real economy is based on principles of balance, sustainability and responsibility. It cannot afford to chase inflated numbers, fictitious metrics, exponential growth not supported by fundamentals. It must balance income and expenditure, reinvest revenues in infrastructure and people, provide concrete answers to the real needs of those who pay for a service.
On the other hand, there is the “creative” economy, the one doped by capital injections, by multi-million dollar IPOs, by business models that are based not on the present, but on a hypothetical future promise. The game is well known: millions are burned for years, winning over customers with below-cost offers, in the hope that “one day” everything will turn into profits — a day that, in many cases, never comes.
This economy lives on storytelling, not sustainability. It does not have to respond to a balance sheet that closes in the black, but to a narrative that can attract new rounds of financing, new market segments, new illusions of growth. It is a model that does not foresee margin, but only expansion; not satisfied customers, but accounted users.
It is an economy fueled by ignorant or overly optimistic investors who agree to bet on the “chicken tomorrow” and not the egg today. An economy that, in order to exist, needs to delay the moment of truth for as long as possible, systematically postponing any form of economic accounting. The real value of the service offered? Often irrelevant. Only the number of users acquired counts, even at the cost of offering services at figures that do not even cover the cost of delivery.
There is no match. But maybe it's not even the same match
The truth is that a healthy company, which operates on the market with ethics and entrepreneurial logic, can't compete on that field. And perhaps, if you look closely, he doesn't even have to try. It cannot lower prices to the point of becoming uneconomic, it cannot cut support to the point of compromising the quality of service, it cannot distort itself to the point of reducing the customer to a mere ID in a spreadsheet, where only the cost of acquisition (CAC) and the lifetime value (LTV) count.
Those who work honestly, who build solid infrastructures and train competent technicians, It cannot sustain a model where price is the only competitive criterion. Because that’s not a business model: it’s a gamble. And by definition, a gamble is based on luck, not sustainability.
The moment you accept this logic of the lowest price as the only metric of competition, the battle is already lost, because the game is played according to rules that do not reward merit, but the ability to resist losing longer.
Let's take for example some Eastern European operators (which, on the fact that Lithuania should be part of Europe, we could open a separate chapter): they offer plans starting from 8 euros per month to host 100 WordPress installations. Yes, you read that correctly: hundred.
An offer that, for those who only look at the figure, seems incredible. Seductive. Even logical, in a world where everything has become “unlimited”. But it is a toxic logic, because those who fall for it find out too late what is behind those numbers.
What is clear and self-evident is that this business model that you can see in the table above of a well-known low-cost hosting vendor, from 2019 to 2022 was a failure with losses of well over 45 million euros, and only in 2023, against a turnover of 110 million, it closed with a profit of 3 million, with a net margin of 3%, well below the real margins of hosting companies.
How can you trust a company that is losing money at this level? What happens when something breaks? When the site slows down, when a mysterious error appears, when you need human and competent support?
It happens that is there no one on the other side? Or if there is, it limits itself to responding with pre-packaged phrases, or to ignoring it altogether. Why? Because you are part of a mass, not of a relationship. You are a cost to be contained, not a user to be supported because they pay (fairly) and are profitable.
In a system where every open ticket is a loss to be cut, the only goal is to reduce interaction to a minimum, keep you on board until you pay — and then never mind if you don't come back.
Unfair competition and dumping
In the hosting world, as in many other digital sectors, we are witnessing a degeneration of the very concept of competition: we no longer compete on value, but on the emptying of the market, fueling a race to the bottom that has little to do with real entrepreneurship.
In theory, a business should be profitable. It should have a sustainable cost structure, a margin, a strategy oriented towards healthy growth. Instead, today, we often find ourselves faced with models in which profit is an optional concept, postponed to a date to be determined - if it ever comes. We are faced with companies that operate at a loss for years, with the sole aim of eliminate real competition, the one that works, hires, pays taxes, invests and creates jobs.
It's as if, in the center of a small town, a group of investors decided to bankrupt the only pizzeria in the area, opening a new pizzeria right in front and giving away pizza to everyone, every day, for months or years. Not to build a sustainable business, but to destroy the existing one.
Free market is fine, liberalizations are fine, but when the goal becomes the annihilation of the other and not fair competition, we are faced with a toxic and destructive dynamic.
As the Nobel Prize winner in economics rightly observed Joseph Stiglitz, “when the market simply competes, it destroys”. Because without rules, without limits, without ethics, competition becomes war. And in war, value no longer has a place: only the one who resists the most wins, even if he burns millions in the meantime.
What is dumping?
Dumping is exactly this: a sales strategy at unsustainable prices, lower than the real cost of the service, with the aim of disrupt the market and crush competitors.
In economic theory, this is a well-known anti-competitive behavior and, in certain contexts, even punishable.
The European framework
At the regulatory level, The European Union regulates dumping towards third countries through tools such as the Regulation (EU) 2016 / 1036, applying anti-dumping duties and corrective measures when clear cases of unfair competition are found. But when dumping occurs within the community borders, between companies registered in EU countries, the regulatory framework is widening, especially in digital services, where fiscal and operational territoriality is increasingly difficult to delimit.
Dumping in services: a trap for everyone
In services — and especially in hosting — dumping is even more dangerous than in material goods, because Economies of scale do not apply to human quality, assistance, technical expertise. You can automate some of the provisioning, but you can't automate the customer relationship, the troubleshooting, the attack protection.
The result? A polluted, drugged market, in which Those who work honestly are pushed into a corner, and Customers are used to expecting everything for nothing, only to find themselves abandoned when something goes wrong.
Those who practice dumping are not doing business: he's just playing to lose hoping to win by exhaustion. But sooner or later you have to pay the bill, they will all be: customers, suppliers, market.
When you are a cost, you are no longer a priority
Those who rely on these providers quickly discover that the economic balance on which they are based does not include assistance, customization, customer care. There is no room for empathy, relationship or listening. The entire model is built to acquire, not to retain; to make volume, not quality.
A user who opens 10 tickets a year and pays 8 euros a month is, simply, a red draft in the budget. An anomaly to be fixed. It doesn't matter how technically complex the problem is, or how important your site is to your business. If you cost more than you make, you instantly become invisible.
In no serious economic model – not even in the poorest economies in the world – can decent technical assistance be justified under those conditions. A company cannot dedicate resources, time, skills, tools, escalation logic, monitoring, if in exchange it receives the equivalent of a sandwich at the bar. It is simply unsustainable.
So what happens? What is obvious happens: you are left alone.
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A DDoS attack? Too expensive to mitigate. Your problem.
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An updated plugin that breaks your site and you want a 40 day old backup? It doesn't exist. Your problem.
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The site is down and you want to sue? We are waiting for you in court, in Lithuania, Romania, Estonia or some other country with jurisdiction not really accessible.
It's a model where your online survival it's none of their business. Where the concept of “service” ends at the moment of payment, and beyond that boundary there is only your technical solitude.
Yet, this reality is cleverly masked by glossy landing pages, high-sounding claims and prices that are too good to be true. And that's where the paradox happens: many only discover it when it's too late. When the site is offline, when support is unresponsive, when the damage is already done.
The first dose, as we know, is free. But then comes the bill. And it is often steep. And often there is no one left to discuss it with or complain about it.
Hosting: Expense or Investment?
That's the point: a customer should not be a cost. It must be a value. But be careful: value is never one-sided, it is always a reciprocal relationship. And this goes both ways. It is a relationship of trust that is built over time, and like any relationship, it requires respect, transparency, and recognition of the role of each party.
A hosting company must offer value — and by value we don't just mean a disk space and a promised uptime in percentage. Those are technical prerequisites, the bare minimum. True value is measured in the ability to be present when it counts, to anticipate problems, to offer competent answers, to treat the customer like a person, not like a numbered ticket in line.
We are talking about human support, real performances, technical reliability, proactivity in management, of a conscious and responsible presence. We're talking about security, attention to detail, carefully managed updates, real, tested, ready-to-use backups. All things that require resources, skills, time e infrastructure. Is that they can't be improvised.
But at the same time, the company must be able to afford to do so. He must know who is on the other side recognizes and supports that valueIt is the customer who, by consciously choosing a reliable supplier, allows the system to function, to improve, to grow. It is he who, by paying a fair price, supports the assistance he will receive, the protection from attacks, future optimizations, the human and technical capital on which everything is based.
If the customer is not willing to recognize this, if he chooses based on price alone, if you consider hosting as a simple commodities to buy on the downsidethen he is implicitly declaring that that service for him it's an expense, not an investment.
And then — as in any unbalanced business relationship — there is no balance, and there can be no quality. A service It cannot be excellent if it is treated as a disposable good. A relationship cannot grow if it is based on mutual suspicion or a one-sided approach. “squeeze it all while it lasts”.
Those who only look at the price already choose, from the start, to accept a minimum level, a technical and relational threshold just sufficient to keep the contract standing. And then let's not be surprised if the service received is exactly proportional to the amount paid. It's not a punishment: it is the natural result of a precise economic choice.
One hosting may seem the same as another — at least as long as everything is going well. But when things start to creak, the difference between an expense and an investment is clearly evident: he who has invested has someone by his side. He who has spent… has only one discount to remember.
Value is a two-way street
Providing a valuable service means taking on real responsibilities. It means being present, acting with competence, responding with humanity. It's not a question of marketing or homepage promises: it's what happens when the customer really needs. And there you see the difference between a supplier and a partner.
Providing a valuable service means:
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be available when needed, not when it's convenient;
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intervene before the customer notices the problem, anticipating critical issues and resolving them promptly;
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build a relationship, not a simple entry in a management system, not an ID in an impersonal CRM that nobody reads;
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have qualified staff, trained, motivated, able to understand problems and propose real solutions — not just copy/paste the standard knowledge base answer.
All this it doesn't come from nothing. It has a cost, and it has a value. It requires solid infrastructure, organization, on-call shifts, continuous training, professional tools. You can't improvise, you can't sell off. And above all: you can't pretend.
If we want the web — and the digital economy as a whole — to be reliable, high-performance and safe, we have to start to pay for the value, and not just because of the price.
Because those who buy only based on price, he's buying only one price. And at the first real problem you will realize that, behind that price, there was nothing.
Everything is beautiful, everything is infinite, but only the contracts matter
The marketing campaigns are captivating. The messages talk about unlimited resources, extraordinary performance, 24/7 support, cutting-edge technology and free one-click migrations. It's all good. It's all infinite. But when things go wrong — and it's only a matter of time — It's no longer what was promised that counts, but what was signed.
In the real world of hosting, what matters is the contract. And the truth is that in the vast majority of low cost services, that contract clearly says that they are not responsible for anything. Neither data loss, nor downtime, nor lack of support, nor any direct or indirect damages. It's all on the customer's shoulders. The illusion of infinity vanishes at the first line of the disclaimers.
SLAs? They are often absent, vague, or constructed in such a way as to not guarantee any real compensation. Just read carefully to realize that the business model is based on never having to answer for anything, even when everything goes to pieces.
Definitely, you may have paid little too, but If you find yourself alone in your time of need, you've still paid too much. And no advertising promise will come to your rescue if it is not supported by a serious, transparent and responsible contract.
Don't feed the troll. A rule that always applies.
Faced with market dynamics now clearly tainted by dumping and unfair competition, we have witnessed with some dismay a couple of small Italian suppliers try to emulate the big international players — but with an even more extreme and dangerous approach.
Let's talk about typical offers “FREE HOSTING for one year”, with a second year renewal for a few cents, completely incongruous with any logic of sustainability, quality and real value.
Those who work in the sector know perfectly well that There is no sane model where you can provide free hosting indefinitely, hoping then that the minimum renewals are enough to keep a company afloat. It's a trap. A play that only those who are willing to close their eyes to reality and live off digital illusions believe in.
And in these cases, an ancient and always valid rule applies:
Don't feed the troll.
Who offers this type of offer? does not seek value, he's just looking for attention. He wants someone to fight back, to stoop to his level, to start a penny war. And when you do that, you're giving them exactly what they want: legitimacy.
Entering into this kind of competition means only one thing: that sooner or later someone will start tying the noose to the ceiling. Why an uneconomic business activity, or which is based on the hope that “success will come later” without having basic quality, it has no way of existing in time. It's a time bomb. And when it explodes, it leaves behind only disappointed customers, damaged suppliers, and a market that's a little more polluted than before.
Our position is clear: we don't stoop to that game. We don't respond. We don't feed that fire.
Let's not feed the trolls. And those who have entrepreneurial vision should do the same.
You were complaining about the low prices in Aruba.
For years we have heard them whine. “Eh but with those prices Aruba is ruining our market…”, “It is impossible to compete with those who do hosting for pennies…” — it almost seemed as if Aruba was the absolute evil of the sector.
But then, surprise: the same people who complained about the 40 euros a year, today have started giving away hosting. That's right. Free. All-inclusive hosting at zero euros for a year, with a renewal for a few cents, not even the vending machine for snacks.
Other than Aruba: at least they have a real infrastructure. And above all, at least they put their face to it, their data centers, and a business model that — whether we like it or not — has existed for decades and It is not supported by illusions and capital in the vein.
But not you: you threw yourself into the ridiculous game of lowering prices thinking that putting “free hosting” on a landing page would suddenly be interesting.
You've done worse. Much worse.
You have taken a sector that is already difficult, already inflated, and you turned it into a market stall circus, where “freemium” packages are handed out as if they were flyers in front of a discount store.
Congratulations! Really: the category thanks you.
When in a year you will have disappeared, or when you decide to increase the price of everything because you have realized that the servers, the staff and the electricity have to be paid for even in your fairy world, We will be there to collect the disappointed and abandoned customers, to explain that there are still those who do hosting with criteria, with dignity, with an idea of the future that does not foresee default as an obligatory stage.
Time is a harsh master, be the customer you wish you had.
There is one thing that no one dares to say openly, but that everyone in the industry knows very well: not all customers are the same.
Some pay 30 euros a year and some pay 3.000 euros a month. Yet, the dominant narrative — fueled by flat marketing and industrial platforms — would have us believe that they are all treated the same.
Never was a lie greater. Real life is made of priorities. And in the real world, a high value customer will always be more protected, more followed and more important than a low spending customer.
If this were not the case, we would still be here offering packages of 30 euros a year as we did in the early days, between 2005 and 2017. But we chose another path, because we have understood first hand that economies of scale can perhaps work for products, but they never work in services.
A service requires time, people, skills, attention, relationship. And all this It does not multiply by pressing a key: it is built, it is supported, it is maintained — customer by customer.
If there is one thing that economic history continues to teach us, it is that the balance, sooner or later, is restored. Companies that support models based on systemic loss, quantity and imaginative finance will have to face reality sooner or later. And at that moment, they will have only two options: to transform radically or disappear.
In the meantime, those who choose a serious, solid, coherent supplier - capable of give value and recognize it — builds a relationship that It doesn't break at the first problem, but it gets stronger precisely in critical moments.
We continue to believe in a model where the customer is a real value, not a financial indicator. We don't sell off what we know how to do. We don't promise the impossible. We don't chase the masses.
Whoever chooses this vision with us, in the long run, vince. Not because it costs less, but because it is worth more.
