Seven red flags when buying a cheap VPS or RDP

1. The price is below the floor cost

Rough monthly cost floor, per instance, in a tier-3 European facility in 2026:

So a 1 vCPU / 2 GB / 30 GB Linux instance costs roughly $3.60-$5.20 to run before a single support ticket. Our Nano is $5.00 — thin but real. If you see the same spec at $0.99/month, you are looking at 20:1 oversubscription or a business that does not intend to be here in twelve months.

Windows at $3/month is more clear-cut: it does not cover the licence. That is an unlicensed image, and Microsoft audits do occasionally take those fleets offline without notice.

2. The IPv4 range has a bad history

This one is invisible until your mail bounces and Cloudflare shows every visitor a challenge. Before you buy, ask for a sample IP from the range and check it:

• Spamhaus — SBL/CSS/PBL listings on the /24
• bgp.he.net — who owns the ASN, and how long they have announced it
• ipinfo.io or similar — is it flagged as a hosting/proxy range everywhere

Any reputable host will hand you a test IP without hesitation. Refusal is the answer.

3. "Unlimited" anything

Unlimited bandwidth means "until we decide you are using too much", and the threshold is in a fair-use clause you did not read. A stated cap of 4 TB you can plan around beats an unlimited promise you cannot. Same for "unlimited" storage on a machine with one physical disk.

4. No company details, no address, no ASN

Look for a legal entity name, a registered address and, ideally, their own ASN and IP allocations. A host reselling someone else's VPS with a WHMCS skin is not automatically bad — plenty of good ones do — but you should know that is what you are buying, because your uptime depends on a company you have no contract with.

5. The domain is four months old and the reviews are five years old

Check whois creation date against the "trusted since 2015" claim in the footer. Check whether the Trustpilot reviews are clustered into two suspicious weeks. Check the Wayback Machine — a real host has an ugly 2019 version of its own website, and that ugliness is genuinely reassuring.

6. No refund window, or one with impossible conditions

Crypto-only hosts cannot offer chargebacks, so the money-back guarantee is the only protection there is. If it does not exist, or it requires a support ticket approved by a manager within 24 hours excluding weekends, that is deliberate. A 48-72 hour no-questions window is the industry norm and cheap for the provider to honour when the product works.

7. Support that only exists on Telegram

A Telegram channel is a nice extra. As the only channel, it means no ticket history, no audit trail, no accountability, and an account that can be deleted the moment things go wrong. Insist on ticketing tied to your billing account.

A ten-minute due-diligence routine

1. whois the domain — creation date and registrar.
2. bgp.he.net — does the ASN belong to them, and since when?
3. Ping and traceroute the test IP from your actual location.
4. Check the /24 on Spamhaus.
5. Read the AUP and the refund policy in full — they are short and they tell you who the host wants as customers.
6. Open a pre-sales ticket at 2 a.m. and see how long the reply takes.
7. Buy one month first. Never prepay a year for a provider you have not run for thirty days.