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ZAP HOSTING (German Company) now offers Lifetime VPS/Rootservers (also Windows) - A chance for small OTS to stay online?

Damon

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This should be a discussion Thread concerning ZAP-Hosting's Lifetime Servers/Offers

Sup everyone,
it's been a while. I wasn't sure in which forum category this would fit best as it is not a "Job" offered by me or anything.
More of a PSA/heads-up:
I recently found out that one of the oldest German (Game-)Server Hosts, ZAP Hosting, now offers lifetime VPS/Rootservers in their product line.
They were selling lifetime Minecraft servers for a long time already, but I always hoped they would add VPS and they did :)
Those servers are paid for once only and you get to keep them forever respective to their ToS (see below for more info; inactivity clause).
This could be a chance, especially for small OTS, to stay online for years without relying on donations and even if only 5-10 players are online small servers could survive.
For those who prefer Windows Hosting over Linux, they offer lifetime Windows Rootservers, too :)

TL;DR: The company didn't have the best reputation over the years, but it seems to have improved in many ways.
I already ordered a lifetime VPS (vServer/LXC vps) from them in Finland which is running stable so far ZAP Hosting Finland VPS Lifetime vServer LXC (Recent History) - HetrixTools (https://hetrixtools.com/report/uptime/f409b9c69d3f363d8ef67455d5e6d4bc/) .
One downside I noticed is that Rootservers still only offer Ubuntu 18.04 (going EOL and apparently bugged image), and Debian 10.
Their vServers (VPS/LXC), however, come with recent images like Debian 11, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which is the product I have bought from them.
They are, however, apparently already working to add new images and improvde Rootservers alltogether.

Website: Server Hosting with ZAP 2.5 - instant online & prepaid - ZAP-Hosting.com (https://zap-hosting.com/en/)
Crunchbase Company profile: Click
Northdata: Click
Status Page: ZAP-Hosting Status (https://status.zap-hosting.com/)
TrustPilot: ZAP-Hosting is rated "Excellent" with 4.5 / 5 on Trustpilot (https://www.trustpilot.com/review/zap-hosting.com) ; Rating: 4,5/5 with 18.000+ Reviews (as of May, 4th. 2023)
YABS (Server benchmark from April 2023): VPS, Root Server 1, Root Server 2


In General:
ZAP-Hosting (German company, founded in 2010), after providing Lifetime Minecraft Servers for many years have recently extended their product line to include:

You will find that the products first display the monthly price, but in the box to the right where the price total is displayed there is an option where you can click "OR xx€ lifetime".)

Sustainability:
According to the ZAP-Hosting website, there are currently 4043+ active Lifetime Servers , and about 32863 active servers in total. This suggests that while lifetime deals are often considered to be a rip-off and not sustainable, even after deducting 5000-lifetime servers, there would still be about 27000 active servers that are paid through subscriptions/prepaid contracts, suggesting that ZAP-Hosting has enough revenue to sustain their lifetime offers and/or doesn't just vanish overnight.
The total assets were counted as 1.926.615€ in 2021 according to data from Northdata (link above).


The catch (MUST READ!):

ZAP-Hosting, in the light of extending their lifetime server product line, seems to have updated their Terms of Service now requiring ALL their customers who purchased any kind of lifetime product (Minecraft Server/Webspace/vServer/Rootserver/Dedicated Server and future offerings) to log into their ZAP-Hosting Dashboard AND open up the respective product's control panel (e.g. if you have a vps with them, open the vps control panel; if you have a Minecraft Server..) once every 3 months to avoid suspension due to inactivity. If you service/product has been suspended due to inactivity you will apparently receive an email stating that you have 4 weeks to contact them, before your service/product gets cancelled permanently and any right to refund is waived.

ToS excerpt regarding lifetime products (April 9th, 2023):

! § 10 Lifetime products
! (1) Products designated as lifetime products are paid for once instead of recurring.
!
! (2) The term Lifetime/infinite/lifelong describes the lifelong right to use the product until it becomes inactive.
!
! (3)** The case of inactivity occurs if the named lifetime product is not accessed by the customer in the customer web interface within 3 months. ZAP-Hosting then reserves the right to switch off and block the product.
! If the customer does not contact us for a further 4 weeks after the blocking (grace period), the product will be permanently deleted and the entitlement to lifelong use will be cancelled.** The customer expressly waives the right to a refund of the purchase price.
! After contacting us within the grace or blocking period, the inactivity case will be lifted for the time being and the product will be fully usable again.
!
! (4) Lifetime products cannot be paid for with ZAP credits (ZAP Coins) or ZAP coin voucher codes.

I confirmed via Ticket that you DO NOT get a warning before the service gets suspended and was advised by the support staff to add a reminder on my phone (e.g. Google Calendar) to remember to log into the Dashboard and open up the product page. The support staff, however, indicated that during time of suspension, the data would not be removed from the service, albeit they stated that it's always good to have backups in the same sentence. I suggested they contact their customers 1-2 weeks PRIOR to suspension in order to avoid production service suddenly getting suspended and apparently my suggestion was forwarded to whomever (likely /dev/null ).


This part about the inactivity clause sounds tedious and annoying, but I'm sure some people might still be tempted and bite.
Fwiw, I already bit the bullet.
The company has been around for 13 years now and it's likely not going anywhere so fast. It has, however, also never been known to have a stellar reputation in the german gameserver market in terms of performance and customer reviews.

Anyway, make of all this what you will. I am happy with my LXC Finland Lifetime VPS from them so far, although I am not hosting any OTS on there.
However, when I was talking to @Iikki the other day, I thought that this one-off payment could be a great chance for small (OTS) projects to succed, so I thought I'd post it here.

Fwiw, I am not affiliated to ZAP, just a customer.
I am running WIreguard+OpenVPN on the LXC VPS for now. It also supports Docker apparently.

Kind regards,
Damon
 
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Bought 1x Lifetime LXC Finland and 1x Rootserver KVM Germany and flushed Ubuntu 22 LTS on the Rootserver using Netboot.xyz because currently ZAP only offers Ubuntu 18 and Debian 10 images for their rootservers. Works like a charm now :)

41b87df11a5bb9c895258538c2783da5.png

Will have a look at setting up OTServBR on one of these to play with some friends (privately).
Since it'll just be for me and some friends it's nice to not worry about any recurring bills and gives peace of mind sort of :p
 
Good deal actually, will probably help someone out :D
I won't use it for anything mission-critical, but for public-facing fun/dev projects where I don't want to think about recurring fees this is great :)
Good to see you mate!
 
Maybe someone can code simple script which will simulate login every 3 months using Selenium or Puppeteer? ;)
 
Maybe someone can code simple script which will simulate login every 3 months using Selenium or Puppeteer? ;)
Someone brought selenium already up, but there's Captcha involved, so you'll likely have to find a robot to circumvent that, too. Most Captcha circumvention services I read about charge a (small) fee.

I've already had a lifetime Minecraft Server with them since a couple years, so now I just have a google reminder set to 10 weeks recurring where I then login and open mc, lxc and kvm dashboard :p

Interesting update: Even for lifetime dedicated server, if the hardware dies, you will apparently get a replacenent with same specs free of charge (someone I know bought a dedicated lifetime server from them).
 
spent some time playing, maybe someone can tune it more :)

JavaScript:
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const RecaptchaPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha');


const USER_NAME = 'username';
const PASSWORD = 'pass';
const CAPTCHA_API_KEY = '2captcha_api_key';
const VSERVER_URL = 'https://zap-hosting.com/en/customer/vserver/show/123456789/overview/';


const delay = ms => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
puppeteer.use(
  RecaptchaPlugin({
    provider: {
      id: '2captcha',
      token: CAPTCHA_API_KEY
    },
    visualFeedback: true
  })
);

(async () => {
        const browser = await puppeteer.launch({args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox']});
        const page = await browser.newPage();

        await page.setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0');

        await page.setViewport({width: 1920, height: 1080});
        await page.goto('https://zap-hosting.com/en/');

        const userNameField = await page.waitForSelector('[name="username"]');
        const passwordField = await page.waitForSelector('[name="password"]');
        await delay(3000);


        await page.type('[name="username"]', USER_NAME);
        await page.type('[name="password"]', PASSWORD);


        await page.click('#login-buttons > .btn-login');

        await delay(3000);

        console.log("Solving captcha...");
        await page.solveRecaptchas();


        await page.click('#recaptcha-login-form button[type="submit"]');
        await delay(2000);

        await page.goto(VSERVER_URL);
        await delay(2000);
        console.log("Saving screenshost...");
        await page.screenshot({
                path: 'screenshot.jpg'
        });
        await browser.close();
})();
 
spent some time playing, maybe someone can tune it more :)

JavaScript:
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-extra');
const RecaptchaPlugin = require('puppeteer-extra-plugin-recaptcha');


const USER_NAME = 'username';
const PASSWORD = 'pass';
const CAPTCHA_API_KEY = '2captcha_api_key';
const VSERVER_URL = 'https://zap-hosting.com/en/customer/vserver/show/123456789/overview/';


const delay = ms => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
puppeteer.use(
  RecaptchaPlugin({
    provider: {
      id: '2captcha',
      token: CAPTCHA_API_KEY
    },
    visualFeedback: true
  })
);

(async () => {
        const browser = await puppeteer.launch({args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox']});
        const page = await browser.newPage();

        await page.setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0');

        await page.setViewport({width: 1920, height: 1080});
        await page.goto('https://zap-hosting.com/en/');

        const userNameField = await page.waitForSelector('[name="username"]');
        const passwordField = await page.waitForSelector('[name="password"]');
        await delay(3000);


        await page.type('[name="username"]', USER_NAME);
        await page.type('[name="password"]', PASSWORD);


        await page.click('#login-buttons > .btn-login');

        await delay(3000);

        console.log("Solving captcha...");
        await page.solveRecaptchas();


        await page.click('#recaptcha-login-form button[type="submit"]');
        await delay(2000);

        await page.goto(VSERVER_URL);
        await delay(2000);
        console.log("Saving screenshost...");
        await page.screenshot({
                path: 'screenshot.jpg'
        });
        await browser.close();
})();
Looks nice. Did you buy a server from them too or just chimes in to help with the script? :p.
 
It's with help from ChatGPT ;)
Ah haha yeah. It's amazing what it can do. Used it to write some bash scripts.

Edit: Many people keep private messaging me on Discord about this Deal, which specs they need or other similar questions. If you post them here others will be able to benefit from the answers, too, and you might also get answers from people who are more knowledgeable regarding ots than I am :)
I've been away from the OTS hosting game for quite a while, and while I will likely spin up a small private ots to play on with some friends, I mainly bought my ZAP Hosting servers for other, non-OT related use cases.
I just shared the deal, so the community and small ots could benefit from it.
I'll try to help if I can, but often enough, I just wouldn't know without checking out documentation on OTS again.
 
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Still happy with my lifetime vps and lifetime rootserver :)

In case anyone is interested in this, there'll be the following discounts according to a newsletter from ZAP:

ZAP Hosting just announced via email the next lifetime vps and lifetime rootserver discounts to be at:

Lifetime vServer:
25.11.2023: 20:00 - 21:00 MEZ
26.11.2023: 11:00 - 12:00 MEZ
26.11.2023: 20:00 - 21:00 Uhr MEZ

Lifetime Rootserver:
25.11.2023: 16:00 - 17:00 MEZ
26.11.2023: 04:00 - 05:00 MEZ
26.11.2023: 16:00 - 17:00 MEZ
27.11.2023: 04:00 - 05:00 MEZ

I would assume the ones early in the morning (4am/5am) will incurr a bigger discount since barely anyone will see them. Yesterday at 2am lifetime dedi was 25% off. Might happen again during such time.. Discounts yesterday and today were anywere between 30% and 40% for lifetime vps and lifetime rootserver :)

At the specified time frame, there will be some sort of banner in the footer showing you a discount code you can use to get the discount.
 
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