New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Question on providers making offers through private messages
I recently posted a question here, asking for recommendations on a VPS. In response, a number of providers reached out through private messages, offering me their plans.
What caught my suspicion is that none of the providers who reached out to me in this way specified a website. I tried Googling the usernames of these users, however, Google also fails to turn up anything.
I'm not really familiar with the Lowendtalk community, but is it safe to buy from these providers? I'm asking this because one of those users has sent me (what I think is) a very good offer, and I think I might use it.
Comments
Go to their profile and:
check if he has provider tag
if the above is true, open discussion tab and look for his offers.
This way you should get company website and later make research. Moreover you can ask us in this thread about given company/user.
let me PM you..
You should always research before buying any products .
By the provider tag, do you mean that the profile page should have "Provider" listed as a role on their profile page?
Yes.
If I interpret the rules about provider tags and offers correctly, it is to stop providers from being anonymous.
Basically, if you can determine what company a provider is working for, then it should be alright. If it is just a guy that tells you about an offer on his own server somewhere without any website and all that, then that shouldn't be allowed.
I am sorry, won't happen again, I promise
No. Do not buy from strange "providers" who send you unsolicited offers via PN. LET is not a safe place per se. Always keep your brain activated. Report the ones that seem fishy to you to the team, together with what they have written, via https://support.lowend.io/ and we will try to distinguish spam from appropriate behaviour to do the needful.
For transparency: "The needful" mostly involves hungry lions and flame throwers. Sometimes also goats and a bag of salt.
@Amitz that covers doing the needful, but is that each and everything?
No barrels of honey and fire ants?
I love my job
[responded to the wrong thread
]
ummm ok then.
I want to reinforce @stevewatson301's comments. I recently solicited input for an 8 GB (originally 16 GB) KVM VPS or dedicated server here:
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/111228/need-16-gb-server-kvm-vps-or-dedicated-for-1-2-months
I got PMs in addition to the offers in the thread. Several PMs offered specs and prices, but did not include website URLs. When I asked for URLs as an initial follow-up, everyone responded. Some of the websites looked a bit "shady." One source sent me an image file showing their offer webpage. It wasn't a link, it was an image file. Apparently they are having problems with their website. I was polite but, needless to say, I will choose another source.
I'd avoid any PM offers. The barrier of entry to public promotion here isn't that high.
Exactly. I am quite convinced that I know why people would keep their "business" a secret from LET. Two reasons, only one I respect:
Don't want to attract low cost, high demand customers.
Don't want to be scrutinized by people who will call them out on various failures like website full of template content, empty or missing TOS, no SSL on order page, all the little things people get slammed for because they show a lack of commitment.
I fear #2 is true more often, and as a result have no desire to separate them from #1, mostly because I don't know how to do so without empowering #2.
Three: DDOS
HF removed their booter market, dealing a huge denial of service blow to the booter industry
@jarland - can't agree that it's just those 2. For example, I tend to send better offers via PMs to certain people who I like for some reason and prefer to avoid mass sign ups on certain offers I make. Easier to PM than most other approaches.
You can look how old is the provider . If they are in industry for a very long time. Their is no issues to try any of your their services. But we recommend to have a backup plan as well form a known provider. Where you data backup will be kept.
You're not hiding your business though. Big difference. It's only not allowed when you've made no effort to let people on LET know who you are in business.