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Do you think the maximum pricing rules on VPS offers need to be reviewed?
trewq
Administrator, Patron Provider
Hi All,
Do you think the maximum pricing rules on VPS offers need to be reviewed?
This has been bought up by different people on and off over the last little while.
Lets put it to a vote, this isn't about discussing how it might be calculated or what it might be raised to, just if a change is needed.
Please vote in the poll below, if you have any additional thoughts on this please post below so we can discuss.
Brendan
Poll
- Do you think the maximum pricing rules on VPS offers need to be reviewed?183 votes
- Yes63.93%
- No36.07%
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
yes
A definite yes.
Rhetoric question : what is the difference between a fat vps or a dedi ? Don't really make sense to limit vps price limit most offer to 4GB Ram when you can offer Dedi at like 89$/m. Of course, new rule will need to keep price cheap, but yeah ...
I'm still the fan of $7/m rule, however I suggest that offers below $0.7/GB should have no upper limits, so we don't miss on some great deals.
+1 on MrPsycho's idea
Plus offers below $3.5/TB storage
Performance overhead due to virtualization
Suggestion: Alternatively we can split them into 3 category: "Top Provider", "Reputable Provider" and "Provider" depends on how long and how active they are in the community (Top Provider is still only possible via poll). Each of them have different maximum limit.
0.7/GB nice idea
I know that. I just mean there are something between small vps and dedi. For the same reason max price on the dedi was raised, 1GB Ram is not the same price than 32GB. It's normal to see some difference in pricing. Price was raised to allow more powerful dedi, I don't see why we can't do the same with vps.
Honestly i dont see the point of pricing limits at all. Deals either good or its not, maybe instead of a price minimum implrment a downvote system for providers where if they post x many bad offers as voted by community (negative score) then they are restricted from posting offers for x time period. Pricing maximums dont really work with all the different factors at play from location to specs
I'm voting no because when I was apart of LEB and we revised the pricing offers in the hopes of more exotic locations or exciting deals... the only things that changed were the price. The packages were the same but just more costly. The same buffalo deals with an extra couple bucks added on.
I would prefer it be left as is and maybe once a month there is an announcement post that stays up for a small period of time (e.g 2 weeks?) with exclusive offers outside of this pricing limit that can be submitted. E.g Providers submit June 1st > June 30th and then July 1st > July 14th a post goes up with the compiled offers. This also allows for some filtering of offers too.
Then again I also disagreed with the dedicated server price increase initially as I felt the same servers would get posted with $10 or $20 more added on top but that hasn't really happened.
I understand the suggestion I've made is a bit more work than a basic price increase but I personally think it would be better all round.
People don't come here for low end servers, they come here for low priced servers. Maybe a complete rebranding is in order.
What are we if without the $7 meme?
Maybe they can post offers above $7 as long as they post one under $7 as well.
I do like the $7 anchor, would prefer to keep it more or less as is ...
but
I also like interesting offers possibly with dedicated cores and more ram and ssd or storage - even up to something like $20 or whatever (still less than most normal entry-level dedi prices).
Maybe a special "mid-end" category - could even be just on a by-request case-by-case basis, assuming that won't be too much added work for mods - just to see how it goes for a while.
I will suggest to make a tier :
Tier 1 , vps with ram less or equal to 8GB ram must under $7/month
Tier 2, vps with 8.1-16GB RAM must under $14/month
Tier 3, vps with more than 16GB RAM must under $20/month
The $7 limit should stay. If there are a deal that is above the limit, the provider should submit the deal to the mod for manual verification, whether the deal is let worthy or not.
I'd suggest to define what a low end VPS is and then build on that.
If RAM (in GB) multiplied by vCores < 5 -> low end VPS, max price/mo 7$
If Core is dedicated price limit is 50% higher.
Similar for dedis, e.g. Xeon (or other real server class) cores times RAM (in GB) with 2 TB/mo traffic ~ base price/mo
For Atom cores - 33%, For Arm cores - 50%
and so on ...
Plus @FAT32 's categories where the above are for medium providers ("reputable"), top-providers can ask 10% more, simple providers (either new or questionable reputation) have a max price/mo of 10% lower.
Why? Because I like the 7$ rule - but I see that it might be useful to link product, provider quality and max. price. Plus I see that larger offers are at a disadvantage here and I think we should provide room for those while still maintaining our line that offers here must be attractive price-wise.
Perhaps the rules shouldn't be that specific, but I agree with the general philosophy.
When LowEndBox/LowEndTalk just got started, a fixed price limit was totally reasonable, because there was only so much you could offer for that price, and so you got a community of people trying to get the most out of their limited resources.
Over time, the whole process of (shitty) VPS hosting has become so optimized that a fixed price limit has just turned into a race to the bottom; who can offer the highest dopamine-inducing resource numbers within the $7 limit? That's certainly driven away quality providers who don't really want to compete in that, and only incentivizes shitty unsustainable fly-by-night providers like summer hosts and the many ColoCrossing ventures.
So yeah, a change is needed. This community could maybe be saved by changing the rules into something that emphasizes quality of services (and perhaps efficient usage of resources), moving away from the biggest-RAM-for-the-buck trend.
Of course, this board is owned by ColoCrossing now, so that's really not likely to happen at all. Whatever change to the rules occurs, it'll certainly not incentivize against unsustainable ColoCrossing hosts. I hopefully don't need to explain why...
Edit: Also, obviously, a strong vote against just raising the maximum. We've seen where that leads to, and it was pretty much exactly as predicted; the offers didn't get better.
Other than tradition, I don't see why the $7 rule is so holy.
Times change, there are now "big VPS" offers that don't fit well with the $7 rule.
Keeping it simple, I would change the upper limit to at least $9.
Some of the refinements suggested above are ingenious, but they would invariably require more work and policing from the already overworked mods.
Because people are cheapskates. If I can get 512 MB for $7.00, I will never go with 512 MB for $7.01. This will be engraved on my tomb.
But, given that $7 is standing as de-facto for lowend why not revise this and make it $10. Let summer hosts take more, steam games getting expensive...
@joepie91
Oh, my post was just meant as a rough sekeleton to show what I mean. Certainly the numbers might be discussed, adapted, changed and the resulting rules should be way better presented that I did.
The base line is (a) to cover more variety, and (b) reasonable quality for an attractive price.
Just to note that LEB has had a $10 limit for VPSes for some time now: https://lowendbox.com/submit-an-offer/
(The limit isn't always enforced, but this is another issue.)
Though there are many interesting suggestions, most of them will result in a logistical nightmare for the mods here. In my opinion, if the max price limit has to be revised, the $7 limit should be kept for new providers, while providers who have been around for 2-3+ years can have a higher limit (eg. $10).
There's not much reason to having way higher limits because most of the people looking for vps in offers here don't require great specs. Those that have more requirements tend to either post requests, look around themselves, or make the jump to dedicated.
I believe let prices should be decreased, not increased...
+1. As this forum is basically about low end boxes (low spec/low priced) and you get a lot more hardware for much less these days in comparison to when the forum was started and this $7 limit was placed, the limit should now be lowered and not raised. Make it $5.
I vote for yes,
for some location ex Hongkong, Indonesia, China, even US, EU location $7 just impossible to offer reliable server.
LOL
Should be lowered.
I have never been in the hosting business so I don't claim to understand how everything works... But it seems to me that inflation is going on worldwide, labor costs are rising, and electricity costs are rising. At the same time, though hardware costs and networking costs have gone down, it's not as if providers aren't providing better value over time. And you guys want the $7 limit to be lowered? For example, 5+ years ago, getting 1 Gbps shared ports on a vps was a rarity. You used to get maybe 1 GB ram on a kvm for around $5 monthly and that would have been a decent deal, but nowadays you can get 4 GB ram if you look hard enough, and you have more bandwidth, faster cpus etc. at the same price of $5.
Why have a limit at all?