I find it really annoying when tradional hosters (indeed in NL and DE for instance) move to the grifting 'pay per use'; the same VPS that I could beat over the head for millions req/month for 5 euros, now costs, for the same usage, 50+ euros because suddenly i'm paying for the cpu, memory, disk, network etc that I use. It costs them $0 extra, so that's all profit. I had it a few time now ; you can recognise it either indeed if they get taken over by some large investment firm and/or when they start offering more and more 'cloud services' next to their VPSs; once they have the infrastructure up and running, they start screwing over people. Mind you, if the service was better, then maybe, but it's not; it's just vastly more expensive.