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Tip to providers selling ultra cheap services
When selling ultra cheap hosting services, no matter how detailed the description of your service, or how much you downplay the expected performance, and service level, it seems that it will be inevitable that a very good portion of registrations will never read any of it, still sign up, and have unreasonable expectations and demands.
I think that a majority of people probably do still read everything and have realistic expectations, but when dealing with extremely low margin, or loss leader type services, any additional work will have an impact on your bottom line.
Rather than do away with the ultra cheap services (think $10 /yr NAT VPS plans), providers could probably name the plan 'Donation' with the product brief saying something along the lines of 'Give us money for nothing'. You further have another product in your billing system, which has a title and description that is ACTUALLY what you are selling, but have it perpetually out of stock. Finally, you have a product description page that outlines all the details of the service, and in the fine print, you mention that it can ordered by going through the 'Donation' plan.
I suspect this should be a pretty effective filter, and allow hosts to continue to offer ultra cheap services.
Comments
Bad day?
No
Just a little annoyed. I mean I wrote an entire page saying that the NAT VPS we offer is utter crap, saying that users must expect 50kbit/s network speeds, 1MB/s disk I/O and there is no refund, no support, and no SLA. Users must expect lots and lots of downtime, etc. etc.
We call it NAT VPS, so it should go without saying that there is no public IPv4 address. Actually we say it any way just to make sure it is clear.
And yet, the most common complaint after someone orders? They cannot use the VPS because it has no public IPv4.
I cannot think of a way to make it any clearer to people.
So I figure if you basically give it a completely different name, then no one will order it unless they have read some instruction saying that that is what they must order in order to get the product.
It seems a little crazy, but I bet it will work. Will be doing that later today
Works pretty well for me, I bet if I was able to translate that to mandarin I could start taking orders from China again as well.
I mean occasionally one slips through and I get a "WTF you gave me a local IP" ticket but i would say that's the 1 in 100 now.
1/100 is still too many
More than 50% of my NAT VPS orders are from China..... They absolutely don't read anything.
welcome to the internet, you might want to start translating your order form in to every single language then.
Stop selling Nat vps then.
Here you go:
【 】私有 IPv4
我明白这台主机只备有私有 IPv4 (NAT 网络地址转换)
【 】LowEndSpirit
我已经在 lowendspirit.com 充分阅读并了解我购买的产品是什么
【 】无退款
我明白一旦购买后无论如何都无法要求退款
【 】无支援
我明白贵公司将不在此产品上提供任何的支援及帮助 (论坛上的志愿支持除外:https://forum.lowendspirit.com)
【 】论坛
我明白如果我没在论坛上注册的情况下提交工单,工单将自动关闭且不被受理
【 】IPv6 为主
我明白此项服务是以 IPv6 为主,IPv4 只是特别补上的(测试 IPv4 可在 https://forum.lowendspirit.com 找到)
A friend who spent his college time in China told me that some college kids in China use ultra cheap VPS's as proxy servers to browse porn sites that are blocked by their government. They paste and copy some random commands on the Internet and hope they will work on any VPS's. When those commands don't work well they will just hit the dispute button and move on to another host company.
My friend learned how to set up a proxy server from his Chinese roomate and enjoyed his little happy time as well. Now he still brags about his porn related storys time to time.
Probably one more is needed as there in Gestiondbi
IP may be throttled or blocked and you wont receive refund for this.
Edit:should have quoted @AnthonySmith instead of FAT32. Sorry.
That is important too, added inside the bracket on 3rd point:
我明白一旦购买后无论如何都无法要求退款(包括 IP 被和谐)
@FAT32: You're a very helpful person.
Nah. My solution works well.
My post wasn't an angry one. I wasn't complaining. This I think is a genuine solution.
@FAT32 time to talk to @AnthonySmith if you can handle the Chinese customers.
Every day that includes dealing with people is a bad day.
I totally feel your pain, randvegeta. I work as an admin, and also do the helpdesk. Due to my job I found out that at least 60% of people must have an IQ of less than 90. And I'm not talking about computer skills! I'm talking about thinking in general. Also, reading seems to be the horror for most people. They avoid it like the plague!
Thanks, I will give this a try and open up orders from China for a little bit see how it goes.
Will we also have LET in mandarin?
Let me know if there are more (I found that there are some specific one like TOR)
Unfortunately I have other commitments so I am unable to work as full-time support
There are times where your offer get "featured" in tons of Chinese affiliate sites.
The problem with that is they might not present the offer correctly in terms of specifications, terms and etc. And to make the matter worse, prospects would just trust what those sites say, and ignore the information on official site, regardless how many ticks you require the customer to tick.
And then you get charge back with reasons saying you are not delivering what you promise, which is based on false information given on those affiliate sites.
It's really fun, I'd say.
Am I the only one with cheap services that hasn’t had any big issues?
I must be lucky (or provide good service)
I believe what some providers do is nuts, dealing with 1 customer with huge expectations who nags you constantly but pays $$$ is always better in my book than dealing with 100 customers paying $, even if they're all well-behaving and expect nothing; in such a model anything breaking automation and requiring human hands – and brain, and time – makes it a peril. I sincerely can't understand how this is sustainable in the long term if your business isn't structured and organized with a decent team already; one-man shows for the low-end segment choosing to stay in the low-end segment without hiring a team of collaborators even when they've made their name out in the business — such guys are brave kamikazes to me. Props to you
Dealing with humans as customers is the bane of IT
Then take computers as your customers, and sell them... humans ?!
Maybe you can try adding a catch checkbox somewhere in between like
I want that hongkong NAT VPS with high latency, 95% SLA, for $2/year .
Why do you offer such a service in the first place? If you know that what you are offering is barely usable to make it sustainable for you, just have some ethics or let's say pride in your work and don't go that route.
It's not really what you get. What you really get is almost always better. The levels indicated are there to lower expectations, and to illustrate what would happen if everyone used their 'fair share'.
The vast majority of VMs idle, so when you do need a bit of resources, normally it is available. But it's not going to be guaranteed good performance all the time.
If you say typical I/O will be 50MB/s, if you don't deliver it, then they say you mislead them. Better to under promise and over deliver IMO.
The service is very usable, depending on what you want. A small VPN? No problem. A little box to run a basic web server over IPv6 and protected with CloudFlare, all good! Monitoring scripts, ping tests, traceroutes, etc Why the heck not?
Running a big video encoder, and streaming 4k video from Youtube? No!
I do not see anything unethical or 'shameful' in offering a service of this type.
It's not exactly profitable, but it's certainly sustainable if people's expectations were in line with what the service is designed for. The problem is that people don't read diddly squat and a lot have no idea what NAT means.
It is my hope that changing the product name in the billing system to 'Donation' or 'Not A VPS', will stop people from blindly ordering it.
If you want a real VPS, order a real VPS. We have that too, but at a very different price point.
edit:
Running extremely high density servers like this also really helps test the limits of what your setup can do. It's a great way to find things out and learn just how far you can push things with real life users.
Know your customers better before you sell your products to them.
If you aim at buyers from China, you have to know that their purpose of buying a VPS is to use it as a proxy to bypass the GFW.
They are not our target
chinese people should blame their own government for GFW.
Instead they are wasting their time and money try to bypass GFW.
Maybe @randvegeta should just provide cached porn content so clients are still happy