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LET did not start as or intend to end up as it is today, you say it's not LET because of a price change, I say It is not LET for different reasons that go beyond that.
Appreciate you might not like it but you're in the middle of change, not the start.
Whoever wants it, don't assume everyone is only in the $49 or lower market for servers. Sure most like a great deal but that can come in the $80 price range.
Now that is just pandering to your individual needs. A dedicated server category would be more than sufficient to segment those offers.
I think I have covered this at least 3 times now, you cant just call a price lowend in the context of a dedicated server when what you get is so variable.
Did CC come to LET and asked to raise it for more clicks?
This was what, 5 years ago, maybe 6?
Not that comparing a static advert in a single location really has anything to do with the massive variables when dealing with dedi prices in all regions and different configs, but I get it, when the time comes you will vote no, that's fine.
Is $84 still hobby/end-user stuff? In general I find the region between $50-120 kind of awkward. You leave the single users behind but still can't provide enough support at that budget to call yourself production ready.
That's only an upper limit, not a single price.
I see lots of people talking about consolidating VM's into dedi's, well now you might be able to get a dedi to consolidate your dedi's.
I guess it really depends on your location.
Is it just me or does it seem like raising the price appears to some that it's the end of ever seeing another cheap (say less than $49) server...
The way I see it is simple.
All the existing providers offering dedi still will and more than likely at the "low" price they always have with maybe a few higher spec, higher price offers.
It may bring in other providers who will offer in the $49 - $84 range but no lower.
OMG, the end is nigh! Spend the money on hookers instead!
That's what I hope happens and I will work on it to see that it does, if it fails it fails, it may end up being regional pricing instead, in hindsight maybe that would have been a better first trail, perhaps Asia-Pacific first, even $84 is super hard there.
Personally I find quarterly pricing usually within my comfort zone / risk tolerance both for VPS and dedicated server offers. (For example DbD's $99 per quarter for 32 GB e3-1270 comes to mind).
One thought about judging results of dedi price cap increased to $84 based on 3 month timeframe - note that (low end) server prices seemed to have spiked a bit in January (extrapolating from Hetzner auctions). Maybe they've started to come down a bit recently but still way up from for example the 32 GB e3-1246 I got for about €28 monthly in December - now see similar available again but for over €40 per month.
While I expect low-end server prices may well drop again (assuming some correlation with demand from crypto miners) the point I would consider in this context is that there may be larger factors at play in low-end dedi pricing than $49 vs $84 cap on LET offers. Still may be possible to get a general sense of trend on LET, but seems difficult to really definitively attribute much in the way of cause and effect here.
All that said, am in favor of trying new price paradigm for dedis. Can't always quantify everything down to a "t", but it should at least be possible to get maybe a more qualitative sense of increased diversity in offers (or not, we'll see soon enough I guess).
$84 is undeniably low end down under.
@oliver got any dedi's for $84 or less?
I think people on this forum are completely spoiled by the pricing limits set on LET. I mean $49 for any server is pretty damn cheap, and for certain jurisdictions (think ALL OF ASIA), a dedicated server for $49 /month is just crazy cheap, and basically can only be offered basically at a loss.
Even $84 for a server in HK would be considered very cheap, but at least sustainability is on the table.
Same for the UK which is very regional, often people think London is expensive, not really compared to other areas in the UK.
The other thing is that if we attract providers that don't as a rule offer cheaper services they may well do an offer at some point and advertise it here, win win.
I don't purchase dedies I'm not rich enough nor do I have the need yet.
Yet most of the extremely lowend dedies I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot
@nekkie
pole because I would like some support just in case I wreck my OS or something bad happens.
Also lowend is relative for instance, I would consider $21 to be lowend for vps depending on spec.
For instance the hetzner cloud so far is an amazing deal so far.
I'd have kept the lower limit. LET as I see it is mostly about servers affordable using personal and hobby budgets. Those users are likely to start with the cheapest servers available, then later possibly move upward as their requirements or appetites increase. The $49 cap is high enough for plenty of entry level dedi offers. Once someone is using one of those and wants something more upscale, they will by then know where to find it. Some allowance could be made for special locations like Asia if the audience here wants it, but for the usual places $49 is fine.
That some vendors overestimate their margins and don't survive is nothing new and won't change. Remember the race to offer more and more resources in the $7 VPS limit? Getting a whole (virtual) server for $7 was astonishing when I first heard of it, but after a while $7 for a VPS became a fairly high-ticket item. LEB went the wrong direction by raising the limit to $10. I thought it should have been lowered instead.
It's not a new observation but LET-style hosting is probably doomed anyway, now that bigger hosts have moved into the space and bring economies of scale that the traditional small LET host can't match. If I knew a way to do it, I'd cede the server market and be trying to stir new development in budget colo hosting, not (as someone put it) turning LET into a better-moderated WHT.
Erm why reading this I do feel like we're discussing upping the minimum sale price of a dedicated server on this forum ?
We're talking about upping the maximum, i.e. expanding the scope of LET to reach up into the midrange. That coincides with a desire some members have expressed for the forum to act more upscale and professional. I'm just one member but I would rather that LE continue to mean low end, including the relaxed and sometimes degenerate atmosphere. I'm not here as a professional-- when I do that I expect to get paid for it. I like the cynical and cheapskate atmosphere of this place and don't want to mess with it.
That has been observed for a few years as you say, now that you have DO, Vultr, Linode, OVH, Hetzner and others firmly in that space now you can be sure that it's pulling more and more away from LET based providers.
Hetzner dropping a €2.50 plan on the market with those specs does make you wonder where next not so much for them but others. The smaller operator really cannot compete with that and if that entry point spreads to others then the majority of LET providers are as well packing up.
Now, of course, there is still a place for many customers in the LET market, I personally wouldn't want to host them but some will.
Agree however what difference does it really make if a few of those offers come here? None whatsoever. It would be refreshing to see some new providers even if the price is higher, remember the cheapest deals will still be there if that is what people want.
Indeed, however, take a look around at many of the offers you see on LET, at $2 or $3 you are in the main opting for a high or at least higher risk item. Will it stay up, will it perform well, will the provider still be about next week?
Actually more to the point, what providers continue to do is underestimate the challenge in selling on a site like LET, the abuse, chargebacks, over demanding and impatient clients quickly destroy any chances they may have had. Whereas Hetzner, OVH and other are more simply "fuck you, account closed", end of, no more discussion. They can do it, small providers find it harder.
But of course, none of that you could say is your issue as a single client. However, it is if you want those cheap deals to keep coming from the small provider.
It wasn't me.
Yeah, $40 USD, like VortexNode, then there's no support, vendors aren't paid, and bad things happen.
Man, I'm El Cheapo here, don't try to steal my position which I've earned by being too cheap for years.
I nowadays think a bit different tho, being a provider made think twice before judging an offer. And I assure you: If I want to keep the service for a long time, I am more than glad to pay more, because I know that it's profitable for the company.
Let's just get some facts straight:
1 - A business wants/needs to be profitable or else, there's no point doing business other than losing money (exclusions apply: e.g: deals to increase client base, etc, but that's a marketing expense/loss-leader, and should be done right);
2 - Hardware costs money;
3 - Spare parts cost money;
4 - Colocation space costs money;
5 - Bandwidth costs money;
6 - Power costs money;
7 - IPs cost money;
8 - Staff costs money;
You're including all this in your $40 USD, damn, Portugal's Prime-Minister should hire you to manage our finances department.
You can't just demand providers to lose money, nor to price match the others. That's what providers do behind the scenes, and that's their own decisionn, if they want to price match or not. Different companies have different vision/goals, as well as costs.
I think the $84 USD price limit is awesome, that'll attract new providers, and granted that we'll still be cheap. No one is forcing you to order, at all. This is opening new possibilities. I wonder how many providers have considered posting their offers here before, but the $49 USD price limit was... Completely impossible for them, unless they'd do it for fun or a loss leader.
Mind you, even @Clouvider isn't profiting much with cheapskates like us. I got a custom deal that he's probably doing like 10 GBP profit per month.
We'll still have cheaper options.
Now, personally: Looking for an E3, 32GB RAM, 2x1TB SSD, in EU. Ty.
Nah, people will still cry (like @Neoon) because $84 USD is too expensive, yet, a large percentage of our members probably spend that, or even more per month, for VPS's with random providers. Ah, and at least, 50% idling. I done that for years.
Of course you know perfectly well where to find that and what it will cost. I wouldn't consider it to be a low end configuration. In fact if no one can offer it for $49/mo then that pretty much proves it's not a low end configuration. That's perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with wanting a midrange or high end server (even a 2x E5-2696v5 with 1TB of ram and 16 drives or whatever), but you might have to look for it outside of LET offers. I don't understand why that's a problem.
The previous amount was $49, but $40 is ok. Nobody demands providers lose money. Some providers decide to offer plans where they think they can make money but it turns out that they can't. That's just how business works. There are lots of sub-$49 dedis and sub-$40 dedis and there's a whole long-lived thread about sub-$20 dedis. I have two sub-$20 dedis myself (Kimsufi) and a sub-$5 dedi (Scaleway C1). Obviously these are not high-resource dedis.
Increasing (or eliminating!) the price ceiling increases the resource ceiling, but I think our readers wanting high-resource servers are knowledgable enough to find them without explicit LET offer threads for them.
Huh, I never mentioned $49 USD as a budget. I can find an option or to for $84 USD with such config, or close to. :P
Willie, you clearly didn't understand my point.
This is no longer LET, it's actually: Let's grab the most, for less. LEB/LET was founded with a principle: cheap VPS'es, with very small resources. Back in 2010/2011, we'd pay $7 USD for a 512MB VPS with 10GB HDD RAID 1. Things are different nowadays. We'd pay $7 USD for a 4GB VPS with 100GB SSD. That's just not feasible. I mean, do you want an Atom with a 500GB HDD for $49 USD? Sure, that's fine, still profitable, so that'll work out. Now, there's also a demand for shiny SSD Dedicated Servers, and even NVMe. There are plenty of providers that could advertise here if we didn't have the $49 USD limit. This doesn't mean you won't see cheap offers, this means that you'll probably see higher end configs, for less than its usual/standard price. Like, E3s with 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, or 2x480GB SSD for $84 USD. Is that expensive? Hell no. Not at all. Will it sell a lot? For sure.
We'll see lots of competition anyway, providers will compete with each other, but they can now offer something better than usual, and we can welcome new providers here as they'll be interested in promoting their offers here.
It's a win-win situation:
More offers;
Cheap offers;
Prices will be lower than standard/regular prices;
Specifications will be much better;
Again, we'll still have cheap offers, granted, less powerful servers, etc.
The idea here, is, we can still be cheapskates, we're now able to pay more for more resources and better specifications.
Still a great deal. Having worked for a bunch of hosting companies paying 200 USD per month for an E3 16GB RAM, 2x1TB HDD HW RAID, where they could pay like 60 USD for that here, or even less, that'll attract new members as well. They'll be cheapskates like us, we'll all have more options to choose from. And always remember: No one is forcing you buy anything.
Sure, I think you were supporting the $84 level on the grounds that E3+2x1TB SSD was a low end configuration you couldn't find at $49 but can find at $84. My response was basically that 2x1TB SSD isn't a low end configuration to start with, so why are you looking for it here? 2x240GB is closer to doable for low end SSD servers.
We already have cheap offers (sub-$49) and most of the hosts offering those also have higher end offers for those who want them. Regarding "more offers" necessarily being a win, I'm just saying I'm not willing to take that as a given. There are some members who want the forum to grow and anything that attracts more people is good. Some others including me like its current style as a specialized watering hole catering to a particular type of niche clientele, and find it enjoyable and sustainable at its current size. For those wanting a more mainstream approach there is always WHT.
Frankly I've been tired of "low end" for a while and the way people create and exhaust threads around here about servers that exceed the low end limits, I think I'm not alone.
Even with no price limit, people have their budgets. It used to be easy to say "yeah but this is where you go for low budget without having to dig through the other offers" but it's hardly worth arguing when we're a community that already knows what we want, and maybe accept a couple of new providers into our inner circle every year.
We're not even vaguely close to a point where the upper end of the price limit is making it difficult to locate the budget deals.
We see lots of threads asking for things that are unsustainable unless or if we can even harness the power of quantum computing for cheap. /s
I think no matter what the offer limits are, there will be user-created threads like that. But those threads themselves have a de-facto limit. You don't see many of them about quad cpu E7 systems, or even over-$100 servers. With the offer limit raised to $84 we'll see over-limit threads going up to say $150. Then there will be pressure to raise the offer limit to $125, rinse, repeat.
To use a dreaded car analogy, imagine there's a forum for enthusiasts of driving beater used cars. They exchange tips about keeping those cars running, maybe some used car dealers show up with junkers to sell ($500 limit), etc. Sure, there will be members who are also into nicer cars (maybe even new ones) and there will be threads about that. But start raising that $500 limit and soon the character of the whole site changes, it gradually becomes a showroom for new car dealers, and the beater enthusiasts are left without a home.
This happens in every walk of life. Neighborhoods become gentrified, junk stores morph into fancy antique shops, etc. Of course that's understandable because of how the owners benefit, but none of us here have a financial stake in LET, so why would we want it to happen to us? What does anyone here want with a 2x1TB SSD dedi anyway? The driving application of dedis on LET is media servers that want tons of HDD storage plus some transcoding CPU. A big SSD dedi is mostly a service provider thing, not really part of the LET audience.
$84 will no longer be low end. since miners are pushing this market for higher price, LET community will suffer further for other usage.
On the other hand - expensive providers will NEVER appear here despite price changes instead more miners will be here to match the deal.
I posted in the offer rules thread that instead of increasing the monthly rental ceiling for dedis, it might make more sense to keep it where it is but allow setup fees up to $100 (currently setup fees don't seem to be allowed). That could help keep away miners.
Would a setup fee keep away miners? I don’t know how the typical miner operates, but unless they’re working on razor-thin ROI currently and tend to only keep servers for a month of two, I don’t understand how it would make much difference.