You buy discounted crap on Cyber Monday.
I bought cheap hardware when tariffs stranded a bunch of inventory in domestic warehouses.
You will eventually pay for rising compute costs via vendor lockin.
I locked in lifetime discounts on rented servers on Black Friday, and practice dancing on resources like they're hot coals.
So I'm chuffed that I bought a handful of 4TB hard drives for $20, now going for $30 after rising to $60 before this discount period.
It's likely they'll fail in 18 months, but my $300 drives will also likely fail in 4 years.
I did get a little bit scammed / rugged on servers though. Here's how--
I get sub-10ms latency with servers in US-East, but they have gone up in price by 15-20%.
One hosting provider^1 advertised a 25% lifetime discount on Black Friday, and I only realized after I switched that the discount is only available for US-Central at about 30ms latency. US-East is a paid add-on that takes the all-in cost up almost 10%.
I've convinced myself after-the-f...
