Quarrystack managed hosting review: fast until the invoice arrives
Excellent performance, honest uptime — and a bandwidth overage policy that turned a $40 month into $217 without warning.
- Published
- Last re-tested
- (3 months ago)
- Next review
- (in 2 months)
- Reading time
- 7 min
No affiliate links in this review
There are no affiliate links in this review. I earn nothing whether or not you buy this product.
Full disclosure policyQuarrystack is technically good. p95 response time on my workload was 118ms, measured uptime over 103 days was 99.98%, and deploys were consistently under 90 seconds. Then a single traffic spike produced a $217 invoice against a $40 plan, with no spend cap available, no alert until after billing, and no ability to cap egress.
What works
- p95 latency 118ms, p99 340ms on a real Node workload
- 99.98% measured uptime over 103 days (external monitor, 60s interval)
- Deploys consistently under 90 seconds, rollbacks instant
What does not
- No spend cap, no hard limit, no pre-billing alert on bandwidth overage
- A 4-hour traffic spike produced a 5.4× invoice with no warning
- Support took 4 days to respond to a billing dispute and declined to adjust
- Egress-priced architecture makes leaving expensive by design
Buy it if
- Workloads with genuinely predictable, low egress
Skip it if
- Anyone who cannot absorb a surprise invoice
- Content-heavy sites, media hosting, or anything that might go viral
The performance is real
I am not going to pretend this is a bad platform technically. Over 103 days with an external monitor polling every 60 seconds from four regions, I recorded 99.98% uptime and a p95 response time of 118ms on a real Node application serving real users. Deploys averaged 71 seconds. That is a good platform.
The invoice
Swipe the table sideways for the remaining columns
| Month | Base | Bandwidth | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 2025 | $40 | $6.20 | $46.20 |
| September 2025 | $40 | $9.10 | $49.10 |
| October 2025 | $40 | $177.40 | $217.40 |
| November 2025 | $40 | $11.80 | $51.80 |
October's spike came from a single article being linked from a large aggregator for about four hours. Traffic was legitimate — no attack, no bot storm. Quarrystack has no spend cap, no hard limit and no option to serve a degraded response after a threshold. The first notification I received was the invoice.
This is the specific failure mode
The dispute
I raised it as a billing dispute on 3 November. First substantive response arrived on 7 November. The position was that the charges were correctly calculated and disclosed in the pricing page, which is true. No goodwill adjustment was offered. I am not arguing they broke the contract — I am telling you what the contract permits.
Verdict
Not recommended for anything with variable traffic, which is most things. The engineering is good and the commercial design is hostile, and you do not get to have only the first half. There are no affiliate links on this page; Quarrystack runs an affiliate programme and I did not join it.
Changelog
Every change to this review since first publication, including the ones that lowered the score. Corrections are logged here, never made silently.
Checked whether spend caps had shipped. They have not. Verdict unchanged.
Quarrystack added a bandwidth usage dashboard with daily granularity. Still no cap or alert. Score raised 5.1 → 5.4.
First published after 103 days of paid production use.
Sources
Each source is recorded with the date it was read, because vendors change terms pages without notice.
- Quarrystack pricing and bandwidth terms — accessed
- External uptime monitor export, Aug–Nov 2025 — accessed