My BandwagonHost The Plan v2 is expiring at the end of this September, and I don’t plan to renew. So I’ve been exploring a high-spec machine to fully take over my self-hosted services and optimize my VPS plan.

I had my eye on Bero Host’s 2023 Christmas big server.

I didn’t buy this Christmas server at the time, but I successfully convinced my roommate to grab it.

Entering 2024, I noticed my roommate’s interest in VPS dropped sharply. Since tinkering once in March 2024, he never touched it again—all 10 or so machines he bought were gathering dust.

Originally I planned to take it over when his machine was about to expire. We share one Bero Host account, making transfer convenient.

But there were still 140+ days until his machine expired. A few days ago, impatient me asked in Bero Host’s ticket system if I could get another Christmas big server.

I had found an even bigger server in their Discord group—€10/month, 8 cores, 24GB RAM, 420GB disk. More attractive than the Christmas server.

Customer service’s reply strengthened my determination to watch for their second-half promotions.

This morning, approaching the 11 AM lunch time, I was browsing hosting forum posts as usual when suddenly this selling post on hostloc caught my attention.

Holy shit, isn’t this the big server I’ve been dreaming about for days? Without hesitation, I immediately contacted the seller and completed the transaction via Alipay.

The seller was selling because this big server was mostly gathering dust—over the past year, CPU usage was at most around 5%. Hoping to make this server shine in my hands.

Getting this big server made me ecstatic. Going to the school gate to pick up takeout at noon, bringing it to the cafeteria to eat noodles with scallion oil, I was happy the whole way. Dream fulfilled after longing—I’m a life winner now 😎.

After my afternoon nap, I directly migrated all services from BandwagonHost’s The Plan v2 to this big server. Though tiring, it took about 2 hours.

Must say, BandwagonHost’s machines are really crappy—optimized routing is a plus, everything else is minus. Building a docker image on BandwagonHost takes several hundred seconds, on Bero Host’s Halloween big server it’s done in about 50 seconds. Plus BandwagonHost machines can’t have long CPU usage—extended usage gets you suspended. 2 cores, 2GB RAM, 40GB disk, $110/year The Plan v2—I won’t be fooled into buying again.

Always remember, those aggressively promoting BandwagonHost machines are nine times out of ten affiliate marketers—after all, everyone wants a piece of that 22% recurring commission.

From today, I’ll do migration operations daily, gradually moving services from small VPS to the big server so small ones don’t need renewal.

Goal: by mid next year, reduce my monitoring dashboard machine count to around 10!