Why I Paid 24 Months Upfront for My Servers

Cash is king

Just like in the stock market, having immediately available liquidity will always help you seize opportunities as they arise.

I paid upfront for 24 additional months to lock in (at least in the medium term) the price of my OVH VPS infrastructure.

With the commitment already in place, I have visibility through September 2028. That seems far away. By then, Anthropic will have come full circle and launched its own fully Claude-powered hosting platform, supporting all protocols/services and becoming the de facto standard (you read it here first).

The end of cheap cloud

The question is how we ended up speculating on cloud service prices that, until now, felt like a fixed cost.

Because of AI, of course — all production lines have been redirected toward manufacturing HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), which is required by AI GPUs.

While 2023 and 2024 had been years of deflation (overproduction and the DDR4 market flooded by Chinese manufacturer CXMT), the Dirty DRAM Deal of October 1, 2025 would be the triggering event: Sam Altman seized control of 40% of global DRAM production by signing simultaneously with Samsung and SK Hynix (without either manufacturer knowing about the contract signed with the other — you have to admire Altman's genius here).

+40%: welcome to the new normal

This is how we arrived, at the end of February 2026, at a LinkedIn post from the OVH boss preparing people for the bad pricing news to come: 'We think that by the end of 2026, RAM should be more expensive by +250% to +300% compared to September 2025'.

OVH and Hetzner are broadly aligning on pricing (around +40% for VPS) and timing (start of Q2, so from April 1, 2026).

The pressure will spread across the entire market, at varying speeds and magnitudes (AWS +15% on GPUs in early 2026).

The gap that kills margins

If your infra costs go up 40% but your customer pricing doesn't move, you're subsidizing your users out of your own margin.
Probably a good time to:

• renew your subscriptions before the price increase takes effect

• audit your underutilized VPS instances

• revisit your pricing (especially entry-level plans)

• consider self-hosting for certain services