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Comments
Let's be fair here: Only @jarland is highly biased towards several providers. We, the sincere rest of the team (Or: "The Unbiased", that's how we call ourselves) hate everybody equally.
And it's not really a problem with @jarland. He's non compos mentis anyway. I mean, hey, he runs a business with @MikePT. Anymore questions about his mental sanity?
Why is it every thread ends up being a discussion on the provider tag? Buyvm and buyshared provide a reasonable service at a reasonable price. This has absolutely nothing to do with the LET mods or forum. No host is perfect though and this thread was meant to bring up what I find now to be an unreasonable amount of down time. But again this nothing to do with LET or it's mods.
I think you misunderstood.
The plans are profitable, nothing we do is a loss leader, even a $5/year shared. The only reason that is, is because my only real cost is licensing on those nodes. The gear has long since been paid off, even the E5's we're going to be putting into these nodes have long since covered themselves too.
Our IP costs are a fixed price if you check the ARIN pricing sheets.
The problem is that we're low on unused IP blocks so I can't really add more nodes easily to BuyShared unless I start clearing out some of the VPS blocks we have. The VPS side has enough to handle all of my future growth plans for the BuyVM side. We recently increased the price to $2.00/month per IP on new accounts, but that's mostly just to deal with spammers that caused a real mess for me last year. Old customers (you've been with us at some point since we started) can ticket and get the $1.00/month pricing.
The main issue shared has is more the man hours involved. Shared accounts for 80% of our ticket volume from people that need help with doing, well, anything. People not knowing how to use cPanel, or FTP, or Softaculous. Anyone on here doing a decent amount of shared will surely agree.
@Xei is right, we did have our problems and I've worked throughout the past year to stop relying on someone else for our network connectivity. We've started to build things out on our own and are looking to add more bandwidth providers in each location in the coming months. I've offered @Xei a trial on our slices or things like that, they weren't interested, so I'm not going to keep trying to shove it in their face. They had a bad time, all I can do is apologize and wish them well.
@jiggawattz's is only upset because he's banned from our IRC channel. The minute the ban flushes (restart the IRCD, someone clears it by accident, etc) he rushes into the channel thanking people for the unban. He was banned multiple times for not only shit talking staff members he didn't like, but also started asking users that entered the channel looking for help, for their root passwords. He was told not to do this and still continued to. If you go back to his posts a year ago you'll see he was generally supportive of us and even says he enjoys the product. His issue is he's being childish about a ban.
Francisco
The problem with this community is that people will just buy cheap shit no matter how many times the owners of said crappy providers ruin their businesses and create crappy products.
Heck, I've built what 3 or 4 different "low end VPS" brands and here we are many years later and I no longer do that, but if I were to build another one tomorrow and sell a 3GB VPS for $7/month I'd have hundreds of orders on the first day.
While the owners of BuyVM and BuyShared and what else they do mean well it's dirt cheap service and there should be NO complaints about outages or performance. If you want solid uptime you have to spend money. Me personally I use Namecheap reseller hosting and DigitalOcean for all my stuff and I never any problems, because I'm not paying $1/month for 1TB of disk space. I mean, I don't mean that literally, but you should get my point.
Seriously, who the heck would host stuff that matters on something so damn cheap? Unlimited accounts and 20GB of SSD storage for $2? lol
https://www.buyshared.net/cpanel-reseller-hosting/
To defend my own clients, there are many people that start their reseller businesses on that happily. Many of those people upgrade to bigger plans, or what I prefer, they buy more plans so it spreads them out. I got more than a few resellers that have 5~10 resellers and insist I email them the moment we add more nodes so they can spread more.
I've had a couple people over the past year ask me for my honest opinion on how they could get their foot into the hosting market and my recommendation was they start on a small reseller and do some cheaper plans. It was a very easy way for them to be net positive on it without any major overhead.
Francisco
I'm not trying to be a dick nor trying to bash your service in any way but most of my hosting clients are local - small business owners that I have a relationship with locally. I would not put them on a $2 hosting plan. I'm pretty sure we had a situation years ago that led to me never being allowed on your services again but if that hadn't happened and you offered a "premium" service I might consider it. You know, something to compete with the $30 plan I have with Namecheap that has served me well. Support is inconsistent from outsourced people but the service itself has never been down or slow. But that's because people spending $30 on a service are going to be better quality clients than people buying $2 hosting plans. My problem is not with your service but simply the fact that cheap stuff attracts crappy customers.
Jerk. You know I don't speak spanish.
That's the type of client I usually tell these smaller companies to go after and they seem to do well with it.
I can agree with that, if you're not careful it can get out of hand. I think I mentioned it somewhere on one of these pages that I considered doing a "double the price, half the neighbors" update to the shared plans but it'd end up with us either doing a forced price increase, or I run double the gear to segregate things.
Anyway, don't mean to derail the hate fest, please continue :P
Francisco
I don't own your business but I think having a premium product alongside your budget offerings would be a good choice.
I think I spent too much time around the russian and I've always been big on "all or nothing" when it comes to things like that. Either I find a way to make everyone prosper, or I don't since I don't think it'll work out cost wise.
Francisco
ok then just increase all your pricing by 50% and you'll probably get half the shitty users off your service and many of your problems will solve themself.
sorry, i'm drunk at 2pm and should just shut the fuck up
This was not a stab at you but I'm not sure how else to take what to you said earlier below....
It seems to indicate that it's an area of your business that you don't really care to develop.
Now you also say that it's based on old equipment, or as you put it, equipment that already paid for itself. Thats interesting and adding to the above it suggests that it really is an area of your business that you have, just have to make use of what would otherwise be junk in comparison to what you operate on what seems to be your main business.
In think it's a fair interpretation of what you said.
I have no problem with it, just like I have no problem with OVH doing the same, if anything I prop you for coming out and say it.
That said, you seem a nice guy that knows what is doing and I have no doubt the vast majority of your clients like working with you.
I was actually thinking on moving a website to your shared hosting but I confess I can't to the weekly downtime.
Sounds like a good time. I think if we went up that we would lose some for sure, but it'd be a net positive.
Because we can't. I don't have more IP blocks I can allocate to it minus the few spares I keep for DDOS protection or internal ranges.
IP's are around $15 - $20/each, meaning a $5/year product is a 5+ year break even. The math is terrible :P
Now, if I suddenly doubled the price we'd get a decent few IP's open up from customers cancelling and I could then split the nodes even further.
Francisco
Maybe I'm too green at this LET thing, or maybe I'm too old for it.
But to me, double the price with good uptime sounds like a great deal.
Uptime is fine, we've had some issues on Litespeed and maybe those issues would go away with half as many people on it, don't know yet.
This is mostly for the people that were upset about Wordpress getting rate limited or some TTFB delays.
I'm welcome to hear what people have to say on things and I can talk with Karen about it from there.
Francisco
Wasn't that Litespeed bump creating downtime for people on a regular basis? the thread is long now so maybe I got lost along the way but if I recall correctly that was the original complaint.
Who's Karen?
You're right, it caused some downtime each day, for about a minute each time.
Karen's a part owner in everything, she's also the our billing manager :P She's called the "Queen of green" for a reason.
Francisco
Does she sneak out every day just before 4:20? If she does, then I think it's for a different reason than you think there, mate
Hah, nah, nothing like that :P
Francisco
He uses actual tabs in Python. He's obviously not that knowledgeable about Heroins; Ignore him.
\t \t \t \t \twhat was that? I couldn't hear you behind all my tabs.Way too much X for that boy.
Lol this guy uses spaces. Didn't know hackforum had dev courses.
..you must have missed that thread. Ho-hum. I'd have expected better of you, as you are root for the entire internet. To show such misappriated understanding publicly is embarrassing; nearly as much as your CD collection.
Had you grown in Europe as I did, you'd not only speak proper (non-US American) English, but you'd know a reference when it was made without relying on footnotes.
Pity. I had such hopes for you. Now let us lock lips, rapscallion, for I am in need of physical contact!
Sincerely,
Rapeybastard.
Haha makes sense.
I hope you guys decide to get a node with nice neighbors, nicer than me shouldn't be hard.
I would subscribe that one in a heart beat... and then complain ad nauseum if I get more than the odd downtime now and then.
I'd much rather just make it a global change and give people a month or so of gap on it.
I'd much rather split the nodes with 50% less users, it makes my life easier and I don't have to explain to people every other day about Wordpress rate limits.
Francisco
Quite honestly, that would be a bold move.
Your current nodes are money makers, so unless your support resources are on the red line, I don't think the PR nightmare and the risk of the churn being way higher than you anticipate being worth not just prepare a node for a "premium" product instead.
Simple math says I would have to lose half my customer base to make it a net loss. I think if I kick some extras like more CPU, inodes, and less neighbors, will win many over.
Francisco
Net loss is one thing, profiting less is another. But kudos for considering to taking the risk. i do wonder how much of this is due to you being tired of catering up to the LET crowd. And you now thinking "fk this, I prefer to earn less than keep this up".
I believe you have everything to make it work. You have the exposure, a loyal base (even when they complain... so that's kinda awesome), resources and the know how to implement and manage hosting with scale.
That said, increasing the CPU would be a must, getting people to easily hit the CPU limit running a low traffic WordPress website kinda sucks.
If you're going to do this, I have a website to move.
Edit: I just saw someone on WHT recommending HostGator for fks... sake. Surely there's space for your Premium services.
"But vswap is what people need, their instances use more memory without it and MySQL crashes stop occurring, and the memory usage levels out to roughly even."
"Yeah but we're not going to add vswap, they need to upgrade."
No wonder we all smoked.
./end_flashback