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Comments
The quiz idea sounds good.
Also be sure to have your script mark the order as fraud after a second wrong guessing attempt.
Well, It helps sort of, although I wonder how much, the densest people just tick them anyway in a quest for the next button.
Strip4Host
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/15/chinas-naked-loans-force-female-students-to-bare-all-in-return-for-more-cash
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/16/loan-sharks-in-china-offer-student-loans-for-nude-photos-giving-new-meaning-to-naked-greed
There's people complaining that they can get direct China routes for $6.50/yr??? This stuff is extremely expensive...
@FAT32 some people just don't care what the TOS reads. PayPal dispute = refund button to them.
Damn right it's cheap!
Sadly also true.
It's amazing how many people have disputed the payment because of 'poor' speeds. Even though speeds average at about 20Mbit, and latency within China is less than 50ms.
Half the time it's because they don't understand the difference between MB/s and Mbit/s. Most test scripts display speeds in Mbytes, not Mbits, and they think it's slow. Though I maintain that if you're pulling even 1Mbit to China for $6.50 /year, it's still a damn bargain. Hell, if it's $6.50 /month, it's still a bargain!
Well here we come again to the most basic point of the question. Hong Kong is a city.
Plus, the rural area of HK aka. the countryside is quite cheap, but sadly you won't find datacenter there.
To the topic, I believe the only way to handle these situations is to respond to every chargeback with enough evidence and let PayPal decide. This is a huge human cost but yes, you won't find a better way unless you use some unchangebackable gateway like Alipay.
Also, had to point out, other than the TOS is in English, the reason Chinese people ignore TOS is quite simple - CULTURE DIFFERENCE - there is no western-TOS-equivalence concept in the Chinese culture. Chinese culture judges the function of a product as what a reasonably educated man believes the product should do. A TOS can even be pronounced invalid by a court if it believes that reasonably educated would believe part of it is unreasonable. E.g. in China, you can still participate in a class action even if the TOS of the product you used said you give up the right to join a class action against the company. This culture different is, I believe, the main issue here, as people doesn't familiar with the western culture or credit society tend to believe the function of VPS should match what their understanding of a VPS ("what a reasonably educated man believes the product should do"), and when it's under their expectation, they can demand a refund. So in all, this is really a deadlock.
It's a city but also a country. Technically part of China, yes, but we have our own laws, currency, language. There is more distinction between Hong Kong and China than there are between some EU members. We even have our own passports.
Patently untrue. There is no such thing as cheap land in Hong Kong, and the vast majority of people have 0 access to actual land. Apartments and housing in the New Territories and Lantau are indeed cheaper than on Hong Kong Island, but it's still damned expensive. $20,000 /sqr meter is not the maximum price. That's not that the price of luxury apartments. That's pretty much the average price across HK today. Cheapest new builds today are mostly in places like Yeun Long. IMO, it's not a nice place to be or live, but even here, prices are over $10,000 /sqr meter.
There is no such thing as cheap property in HK. The CHEAPEST CHEAPEST property you will ever find in HK is somwhere called Sea Ranch .
Only at Sea Ranch will you find property for under US$400,000, and sizes that even westerners would fine spacious. But this place has no road access, and requires 2 ferry rides to reach the City. No shops, and no access to broadband. Most of the apartments here are empty and the clubhouse is completely abandoned. But to live in such a place would still cost you over US$300K. So I maintain there is no such thing as cheap property in Hong Kong.
Aha yes, the word country, is indeed originally different than state/sovereign. But anyway, Chinese are now altering the meaning of country to refer to state, so the safest way is city or region. As whether we can use country on HK anymore, it's up to the linguists.
Yes, I was referring to Lantau Islands, that was pretty damn cheap compared to the city part, I even considered renting a house in Lantau, putting up some solar panel and start hosting myself years ago.
So you wanna downplay their expectations? Label it as 0.00% uptime, 0 Mbit/s, 0 IP addresses, and 0 refund. Put the real spec in fine print, hide them deep in the ToS.
I could help you to translate it into Chinese if you need, but I need to point out that there are some people, or plenty of them buying it for proxy (vpn/shadow socks/etc). It is better to have the limit speed to each nat vps or it would be a huge mess.
This might be problematic and create trouble in some jurisdictions. Better: "Some might consider this as unreasonable ...".
Also you might want to specify/limit it better like "...refund based on problems caused by hardware failing".
Careful there! You don't sell lottery tickets but a service.
Generally one should be careful to avoid the trap of saying thing that can be reasonably interpreted as either "I don't care about the laws. What I say is the law here" or as "customer/client has no rights".
I think it would be better to say something like "SLA? Guaranteed 1%, typically around 80% annually", "Hardware replacement time: guaranteed 1 year, typically 'couple of days'", "We speak english only. Please, keep that in mind".
Ahh this is good stuff. 80% uptime is terrible and yet the terms sound much more reasonable :-).
I'll definitely incorporate this literary gold!
You could shorten this TOS significantly:
"We accept BTC only"
@mksh
But what if I want potatoes with all my answers?
On a real note, I recommend being a tad brief. If it is briefer than I think their is a higher chance of being read.
Don't even think about it.
You'd think having a statement like, NO REFUNDS! is brief enough.
Maybe the short version should be.. You agree to give us money in exchange for a confirmation E-Mail, and nothing more.
@randvegeta
Yes, in the digital age attention span is short.
But looking on your TOS again, it didn't take that long for my screen reader to read it. Glad you didn't just take a screen shot.
https://0bin.net/paste/ZWQGebw1OuQCh6qm#w-iXlvBF0LoCbdiicAb9sGfruUbjyukevsKwk0TW6i/
I did a chinese translate, for a practice. Good luck.
And I wish you take the money, then shut down them VPS. XD
No guarantees is no guarantees. Which means like that: You are server owner, you don't like he did, you kick him.
You sure that kind of things won't happened on the client which he rented your vps for a year?
Sort of like bitcoin mining, proxy, scanning network, scrap some webpage, bittorrenting, DDOS?
Well in western culture TOS is not just a document. "Terms" can also be functionality and could be delineated right at the front.
That is the same in the West. So in this case the OP could aim at communicating what a "reasonably educated" person needs to know about the product.
@randvegeta well from what I heard, Alipay chargebacks are hard for the customer to do, so have you tried just restricting traffic from China to crypto and Alipay and other stuff like Wechat money?
Maybe this is kindof offtopic, would it be a good idea to block Youtube traffic on NODE side and STATE it in the TOS and order form? Many HK Nat vps buyers trying to use it for watching youtube video, which I thought is ridiculous, considering there're so many users sharing the extremely limited BW.
Hongkong to china network speed is slow and expensive. Market competition so, you are not in a monopoly position, you can only adapt to market demand rather than you ask the buyer. We're serving a US publicly traded company, giving prices that are very low or even below cost, but we still find solutions and complaining is useless. Only how to let others know why you are more expensive than others, and the gap is acceptable and reasonable.I believe purchasing power from China occupies the market first place.I offer differentiated operations and different sales strategies for different target groups rather than driving customers off you.I think you should better learn advanced marketing and psychology.
Rubbish. HK has some of the best connectivty to China in the world. It's the go to place to get good performance in China and the rest of the world. You just have to be willing to pay for it.
Blame China Telecom for that. Nothing anyone can do about the rates set in China.
No idea what you're referring to here.
Again, no idea what you're getting at here.
I don't think it is necessary. Surprisingly, the bandwidth usage is actually quite low. I believe most people are using it as a private VPN, but not for streaming videos. Average traffic usage is maybe a couple hundred kbit per VPS.
For every person streaming youtube 24/7 there will 5 idlers to make up for it.
I doubt anyone is streaming Youtube to be honest.
You can see more Chinese are purchased from Europe and the United States.
You do not understand the situation in China at all. Due to political and economic reasons, the bandwidth to Hong Kong is very small, so it is very expensive. Not at all competitive.
Hong Kong's bandwidth has nothing to do with the tax rate.Some of us are there for senior management.More for political reasons.
And again, no idea what you are getting at here.