Black Friday hosting & CDN: separating genuine discounts from tricks

November brings the usual flood of "up to 70% off" banners across hosting, VPS and CDN providers. Anyone who runs servers professionally knows that the large number on the homepage rarely reflects what you actually pay. Here's a method to work it out before entering your card details—valid for any provider.

The three most common tricks

1. Discount based on inflated list price. The crossed-out "original" price was never the actual selling price, only the baseline used to calculate the discount percentage.

2. Bonus credit on top-ups, not a price reduction. Some usage-based providers don't touch the unit price; instead, they add credit when you load funds into your account. bunny.net is a prime example: the CDN is sold on a pay-as-you-go model starting from $0.01/GB in Europe and North America on the Standard network and $0.005/GB for the first 500 TB on the Volume network, with a $1 monthly minimum. Since there's no annual plan to discount, the company has traditionally adjusted things at the recharge level: in a previous promotion, a company representative confirmed on an industry forum that "as usual for Black Friday, we're currently giving a 25% recharge bonus for one payment on Black Friday". The per-GB price remains identical before, during and after the promotion—only the amount of credit you receive for the same spend changes.

3. "First-year" pricing that doubles at renewal. The classic approach for shared hosting and VPS: discounted rates for the first 12 months, then renewal at full list price, often double or triple.

How to calculate the true cost

Don't look at the price for the first period alone: divide the total you'll pay over a longer timeframe.

true monthly cost (24 months) = (year 1 promo price + year 2 renewal price) / 24
true monthly cost (36 months) = (year 1 promo price + year 2 renewal price + year 3 renewal price) / 36

To do this, you need the public renewal price, not the discounted one. Find it on the provider's official price list (not on the promotion page) or ask support explicitly before paying.

What to ask before paying for multiple years upfront

• The exact renewal price in the currency and for the billing period you'll use (monthly, annual, biennial).
• Whether included traffic, additional storage, extra IPv4 addresses and snapshots are covered by the promo price or billed separately from year two onwards.
• The pro-rata refund policy if the service doesn't meet your needs: paying for 3 years to save makes sense only if you can exit without losing everything.
• Whether the provider will change control panel or minimum requirements during the period covered by your upfront payment: a licence change mid-contract is a problem you'll only discover by reading the terms.

The quickest way to verify all of this is to check the provider's public price list on the day you decide to buy, not the price shown on the promotion landing page.