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How long do providers survive on LowEndTalk?
Not sure about whether anybody else cares about these numbers, but I was curios about how long the average provider survives on LowEndTalk and did some research. Maybe there is somebody else interested in these numbers, so here they are:
The above chart considers any provider inactive when a provider didn't post anything for over a year, but already had created at least two offer threads in the past. (Anybody not posting at least two offer threads is considered a provider which maybe just doesn't care about LET.) This way of classification is surprisingly overlapping with the non-200-status-codes returned when following the offering links.
All data was collected through a relatively naive crawler. Over 50% of the providers do not survive for 15 months, and after 31 months about 75% of the providers are gone again. Some other findings: I found 1323 providers and 1206 didn't post anything for over a year (my dataset goes back until 2012); a significant majority does offer VPS, while non-VPS providers generally survive longer (might be related to the sellers guidelines of LET); incorporated providers seem to give up less quick (well, was also to be expected); and WHMCS seems to have a nearly perfect monopoly on that market.
One more chart:
Against to what general LET wisdoms might say: there seems not the be any part of the year where most new providers appear and no starting month seems to give you a clear advantage in surviving. So, no summer hosts phenomenon. Or at least no statsitcally significant one. 
To all VPS providers which are already in business for over 3 years: congratulations, it seems you have survived the hardest part (from a statistical perspective).
Comments
Wow - that took a lot of work! Very interesting.
Its cool. Can you provide the provider who long survived?
Just guessing but probably your usual suspects: BuyVM, InceptionHosting (although Ant is technically "inactive" on LET now), Ramnode, Virmach, Clouvider.
I think recent top provider voting has this answer
good stuff thanks
All the chart really shows is, that if you make unsustainable prices, you will fail.
...summer is coming...
It's June. Summer is already here. People are already creating Tor exit nodes on $0.79/month offers.
The providers that have their own hardware tend to be more solid (HostHatch, Virmach, BuyVM, Ultravps.eu etc). There are trusted providers that have moved away from LET for other reasons, eg VPSDime. Anyway, the fact of not posting offers on LET does not mean that the provider has failed. In some cases, LET is the who failed.
and bandwith is actually expensive from the provider point of view.
I do completely agree. Don't trust any statistic... as the saying goes. That's also one of the reasons why I tried to describe in detail, how a provider is considered "inactive" for the purpose of the above charts. The charts should still be good enough for a rough approximation of the survival rates of new providers, thought. At least, as long as the number of providers leaving for other reasons is much smaller then the number of failing providers. (An assumption, which Iād guess, is reasonable.)
Thanks for the research.
If a provider is inactive here it must not be negative
You can aswell just post offers on LET if you just invested in new hardware to fill up some % of unused resources to get your investment back more quickly. After second year some of them will cancel because there will always be better / newer (even from yourself) offers and then you have resources for your regular offers back then
Etc.
Also always keep special offers limited ( % of unused resources part), so your business won't crash from unsustainable offers but instead will have more advantage from it.
I think,
Its not the offers itself who make business unsustainable, it's the operators who make it that in selling too much.
Thanks
Dude you can't just come here and throw arround all these numbers and charts and prove the whole summerhost thing wrong.
We just crossed over 10 years a couple weeks ago. Was so caught up in stallion coding I didn't do anything special
Ill have to come up with something.
Francisco
Wow! A decade! Here are some "feedback" ideas:
While at it: throw in some free stickers, or toys for children, or coronavirus masks.
You're gonna have a short lifetime.
Congrats sir! Time flies.
Does Virmach have their own hardware or just rent/lease?
AFAIK they colocate their own hardware with different datacenters š
I dont think so? Aren't they heavily reliant on dedicated servers from CC?
Francisco
Hosts deadpool/get banned and they reborn under a new brand. See HostSlayer, who came back with 4 brands already. They dont last longer than a year usually.
I thought they colocate with CC but it seems I was wrong š
That's a good point, I didn't think about handling banned users in the original evaluation. Maybe - if I find some time - I will add parsing of the banned flag and re-run the evaluation. Let's see if that changes the outcome when ignoring banned users. (But not now, it's Monday again - I need to go and make some actual customers happy first.)
This is generally , all new business is difficult in the first 1-3 years , so nothing specially with the results.
Agreed, I don't think LET is to blame for this data as any new business just starting out has to obtain inventory, funding, operating center, etc etc. But the information is definitely an interesting read.
@hohl I'd be interested in knowing the survival time vs package price for a typical package. If you feel up for it of course
Interesting data for sure. Thanks for the effort and for sharing.
No doubt that when starting any small business the first couple years are the hardest. We see that the general rule plays out clearly in the hosting industry too, as indicated by your data.
Nice! Congrats! I just looked and my first invoice date with you guys was August 12, 2010! Most recent invoice was April 21, 2020