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Can someone tell me what that DB is that gets posted/quoted all the time? Did CC get hacked?
Part of this isn't it? (Think it was posted on here earlier).
Lol bye.
@mpkossen
Let me just ask this, what happen to the provider tracker? http://lowendbox.com/blog/hosting-provider-tracker-available-on-low-end-wiki/
I vaguely remember someone said it's on the to-do list but I guess it dropped out from the list somehow, accidentally probably.
Yeah thats the data i'm refering to.
@MarkTurner : By that my buying decison from you goes a bit firm, if u keep that data it means you are serious in this buisness.
There's a difference between RootLevelTech owning a bunch of brands, or even @serverian owning multiple brands. These brands are not hiding who their owner is, or using private WHOIS information on a domain they purchased that is over 12 months old with the intent of hiding their identity in a hope to achieve more business through multiple listings.
There needs to be rules relating to Investment companies, but there also needs to be some common sense rules in place. The SolveDDoS offer isn't a case of an investment company investing in another brand, they hold a track record of "owning" multiple brands but lying about what they own, or flat out denying any involvement in these other brands with the intent of getting more exposure through LE* listings.
Honestly the ability to USE private whois on listings should be forbidden. These are businesses, not hobbies. Would you buy from a company that doesn't provide any form of contact information? What LEGITIMATE reason is there to hide your whois information for a company?
May not hurt to consider only listing legally registered businesses, that weeds out quite a few issues and makes it harder to lie about what company owns what company (still ways around it, but that weeds out a large chunk of it).
Zero chance of that rule being implemented when the following business sites have private WHOIS.
LowEndBox.com
LowEndTalk.com
ChicagoVPS.net (best friend of the owner of LET)
HudsonValleyHost.com (a company CC has said it has "a financial relationship" with)
UGeekVPS.com (a host whose owner, a former employee of both ChicagoVPS and ColoCrossing, committed fraud by falsely claiming Warfront Cafe LLC was an LLC and using a PayPal account bearing the fake LLC name to take payments when no LLC with that name was ever registered. FYI, "Warfront Cafe" was only registered as a d/b/a name and the entity behind it was a sole proprietorship not an LLC)
edited: to fix a typo because I accidentally posted chicagovps.com (a parked page) instead of chicagovps.net...it's pretty pathetic when a parked page has public WHOIS and a business site hides its WHOIS.
Second that. Main reason why I am not posting anything anylonger.
My positiv energy is currently placed in another board where I do have the feeling that my commitment is not wasted.
LET has become a den filled with malevolence.
Exactly. I will try and see if I can come up with some statistics over the Christmas holidays. Because maybe I am looking at it the wrong way.
Well, yes. You are partially right with what you said. I am very hard to convince, because I've been fooled so many times. I probably don't have to tell you about the tricks people try to pull on you, just to get posted or something.
It may be because of that that I tend to lean over to the side with people that have a face, that I communicate with regularly and even speak to on the phone. Some of the people I've even sent a Christmas card to. People I don't know, where I can't put a face to the name or that have no connection to people that can, would probably have a harder time to gain my trust. I'm just drawing this conclusion now, after what you said. So, don't hammer too much on it :P
But I'm asking myself: is it so weird to trust the people that have a face more than others? Is it just me? Just being completely honest here.
Can I see that information or do you care to share? :-)
That could change, of course. I'm not saying it will, but it could. I'll see what Jon thinks about that.
Well here we go. First of all, I have offered my services up to Biloh. This whole place has been tarnished. When you have shills running things of course there is going to be some favoritism.
Anybody who has questions about 24khost, here is the skinny. I poorly planned, didn't have enough liquid assets, and time became a problem with medical issues for me and my family.
Third, I haven't payed attention to this forum for a while, but I check up and the first thing I see is Mo about to leave this place due to all the cowtowing(kissing someones ass), and the way this place turned into just a business and not a community.
John you want this place to be enjoiable again, got a hint for you. Go ahead and own it but let somebody who doesn't feel they have to kiss CC's ass take control and run it the way it should be run. Let that person pick the people under him who are also impartial.
Let this place run like it used to!
Oh, right. I said I would elaborate on the offers. Actually, there's more. I'm also going to ask for advice.
Currently, we have 147 open tickets. Yes, that's correct. With a pace of 1 offer every other day, some tutorials and other posts, we have enough to fill LEB for one year. Maybe even more, depending on the number of tutorials, etc.
I simply don't know what to do with all these tickets. Canned responses are broken, but even if they work, it would take me a lot of time to even send a canned response to all of those. I get ticket responses now "Y U N0 REsPOND?!?!?!11!?/" and I simply don't know what to do with it.
Obviously I can't post them all. Tickets come in faster than they go out, companies drop out, offers expire, and I'd like to accommodate people with new product launches, special dates, etc. And even when I respond to a ticket, I only get another response to about 50% of them.
So, my question to you is: what could I/we do to solve this problem? What could we do to improve "customer care" without investing 10 hours a week responding to tickets alone?
I've tried to think of it all: let tickets expire after two months, limit submissions, just say no to random offers. It all didn't really seem viable to me or Jon. So, please, if you have ideas/advice: let us know! Preferably in the Feedback & Suggestions thread :-)
About the contents of tickets: well, obviously I'm not going to publish them, or it would replace LEB. Like I said before, I am going to try and gather some statistics over the Christmas Holidays. Maybe that will give everybody some more insight on what we get sent.
And remember: the Feedback & Suggestions thread is also for LowEndBox.com. Feel free to share your concerns/ideas with us there!
@mpkossen - I got a resounding 'no way' when I asked what we could make public. I expect their reasoning is that they are spending the money to gather the statistics and to preempt operator failures. This data seems to be being used for both acquisition and credit control. Many of the companies they study are customers, so if we are exposed to a company with a few hundred servers then it can be painful if they suddenly go bankrupt having pushed their credit terms.
I understand. Maybe we could start the community LEB Monitoring Network or something? Would be cool to have this automated. Every company that posts an offer ever, on LEB or LET, could be monitored on their test IP.
So post them all in one day, then start over clean.
For what it's worth I've never received a single email to any of the tickets I've opened and/or had responses from via the helpdesk, it's likely something with emails not working appropriately
Password resets work, but nothing relating to tickets for some reason.
@mpkossen Trusting people with a face is fine. But give the others a chance and judge the contents of their information. If their information is sound, doesn't matter who they are.
@mpkossen
Maybe you need to consider being brutal with the incoming offers; fuck off all the cookie-cutter offers, ones with poor quality spelling and grammar, like you're reviewing a bunch of CVs; you must see enough barely different offers that the unusual ones stand out and you can investigate them further.
It's not rocket science, you've just got to know what you're trying to achieve and set yourself up a process for delivering.
What needs to happen is scheduled posts. They need to be reviewed. No need to write 5 paragraph long blocks about a company. Just basic information after investigation and the offer.
Completely disagree, quality is more important than following a schedule. I'd also like to see more info about a host and their history. I can find out the basics in seconds, it's the research that's of interest.
Well there can be some information, but repeating the same drivel with every post is a little mind numbing. You want that? We create seperate pages about each company with that information. Have a link to it in the offer and then you can decide to read it or not.
Could you elaborate on what you're referring to when you say 'the same drivel'?
Noted. Will test that soon to see what's happening. Nothing in your SPAM folder?
Well, that's the thing. I'm having trouble trusting the data of faceless people, especially when they seem biased and obsessed. I don't know why that is, but I think part of it is in the anonymity.
I prefer to talk to people face-to-face about these things. Sometimes, anonymity feels like people have something to hide. Maybe I have it backwards and they want to stay anonymous for valid reason, but I fail to see those reasons here. I mean, come on. We're a VPS forum, not some sort of spy business (although it may seem like one sometimes ;-)).
Then again, for example @Maounique, has always been anonymous. But him working for Sal has made me trust him. I know Salvatore is a real person, I know what he looks like, where he works, that he receives mail at the address on his web site and that he runs a legitimate and transparent business.
You see what I mean? That adds a lot of weight to Mao for me. I somehow trust Sal and that trust makes me trust Mao as well. If someone doesn't have such a connection, I'm having a harder time trusting people.
I do share a GCal with Asim where we plan the offers as of recently. Of course, we sometimes drag things around. We can't plan everything and stick to it. Our availability, host availability, etc. all place a role in the queue. It's quite dynamic, but we do have an overview and general planning.
Well then learn to. You're running a popular site on the internet. You can't always have a face when you want one, but you'd better read what's given to you.
I say just post the offer on LET before you post it on LEB so people can scrutinize. Crowd source it. It's not like one person can look for these things anyway because it's really time consuming and there's a lot of "companies" to cross reference with.
exactly , why i started a topic a while ago that HOSTS should also share verifiable information with the customers , this should not be one way road.
I'm liking Nekki's approach and it dove tails with how @mpkossen operates. Scrub filter it hard, then talk face to face to the remaining candidates. LEB isn't the community site - LET is. The community does include piss poor hosts, good hosts and everywhere in between. Fair allocation on LEB isn't going to get anywhere and you'll always get complainers one way or another. You might as well take full reign of LEB and curate it properly, steadfast.
In EU this is mandatory - online shops must post their company and contact information on their website. In USA it seems there are no such laws.
There are much better ways to do this. That is why I offered John Biloh my assistance.
Just out of curiosity: to do what?
I read all other comments, but will respond later. Just so you know I'm not ignoring things.