VMHaus closure & NLNet donation

VMHaus implemented Pay just before you Go.

In 2018 Mythic Beasts acquired VMHaus, a small provider of very low cost virtual servers.

As an independent virtual server hosting provider, VMHaus was not financially viable. Post acquisition, we significantly reduced the costs of running VMHaus by using economies of scale from Mythic Beasts. We could recycle retired servers and disks from Mythic Beasts into VMHaus making their hardware effectively free. We provided rack space and transit from Mythic Beasts data centre space at cost price, taking advantage of Mythic Beasts economy of scale and buying power. However, an energy crisis and high inflation post-Covid meant that VMHaus would likely never become financially viable and in 2024 we took the decision to close the company. We gave all VMHaus customers six months notice to migrate to another server, with an offer of discounted hosting in the Mythic Beasts cloud.

VMHaus ran used a pre-payment model; customers had to buy credits in advance, then use up the pool of credits by running virtual servers. If your credits ran out, the servers stopped working and it was your responsibility to refill the meter before this happened. They also had some neat technical features we’ve incorporated into the main Mythic Beasts cloud – per-second billing, cloud-init for customising installs at boot and fully private network segments for each virtual server with IP address portability.

The pre-payment model made the shutdown of VMHaus a bit more complicated as VMHaus held funds that would not be used prior to the shutdown of the company. In order to refund unused credit, we needed customers to tell us where to refund it to, so in order to put a time limit on the wrap-up, we gave customers with positive balances a choice: get a refund, or donate the balance to the NLNet Foundation, defaulting to the latter if we don’t hear from you. The credit balances were typically very small, and in many cases, the accounts had been inactive for a number of years. Donated balances were each rounded up to the nearest dollar, reflecting the fact that this option saved us PayPal payment fees.

The NLNet Foundation funds projects that create and maintain key internet infrastructure – the sort of software that VMHaus and Mythic Beasts rely on.

We’re very pleased to say a large number of customers actively asked us to donate their balance, and combined with the balances from customers who didn’t respond to our many email reminders,we ended up with a final balance of $5240. We rounded this up to €4550 and sent it to NLNet Foundation.