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Blackfriday recap OR How to prepare for BF
So, the main event of Blackfriday once again has past. This time let's recap what was good and what was wrong. From both sides: provider and customer. Hopefully this will help us avoid same mistakes next year.
This thread eventually will be derailed and poisoned with PMS affected individuals, but the main idea will stay and everyone should search for this thread next year.
-- Customers --
So what mistakes I made which lead me to "Out-of-Stock" (OOS) bounce, non-instant service setup or just frustration and over expense:
- I didn't pre-register account with my preferred providers BEFORE event. That lead me to massive delays on registration forms which finished with nice OOS bounce;
- I didn't prepare my revolut card for buying. This means I didn't prefill it with funds;
- I was overhyped and took deals such as one from @VPSSLIM or @ViridWeb . Bad idea, as their ended being BS and refunds was issued. Time and money spent without a result;
- My web browser was not ready to deal with registration forms. There is a ton of plugins which can pre-fill your data and dramatically decrease registration time;
- No hard limits on budget. 8 dedicated servers from Leaseweb... And only now I think where to use them;
There was also a good decisions and practices:
- Guys at liteserver.nl, terrahost.no, cloudcone.com, alwyzon.com, tnahosting.com and a ton others was pretty generous with their stock. Those are time proven providers in the premium zone. All servers was with instant setup and performant from first second of login;
- Don't waste time for server setup yet;
- Don't YABS your new servers, let it be done by someone else. Synthetic tests are not good idea either way as they don't show real world usage potential;
- Always buy with Credit card. It is way faster than PayPal and in some cases a lot more secure;
- If provider is chatty, contact them before placing order. Especially bigger one (10+ servers). You can get better deal;
- Never pay extra for hype, look for usable value, unique solution, something that helps you to broaden your experience. So no @nexusbytes, @virmach or @hosthatch with "open a ticket to order" (what the actual F!);
- Check new provider, how they respond to simple ticket on such important day as blackfriday. If you receive reply within few hours - your are good to go, this means that provider has staff onboard and care for his new customers;
To sum up a bit: if you see a good deal, a nice provider website with all company details intact - take it. Do not overthink. #YOLO
-- Providers --
From provider POV I can share my experience and probably give some advice (9 years in industry).
The good:
- Few providers had issue with network performance from multiple YABS test launched by new customers. But they promptly informed everyone impacted with notice about the ongoing issue. So, critical communication on such important event!
- All providers had multiple payment gateways;
- Preparation for traffic surge on billing server. All, except few, was ready for this. No slowdown, no frustration;
- Clear information on the deals. That credit probably goes to @FAT32 (this 32 years old, fat man is/was phenomenal);
The bad:
- 0 preparation for the event. Let's mention some of these providers: @VPSSLIM or @ViridWeb there is also a bunch more. ALWAYS prepare stock if you investing into blackfriday offers;
- Poor performance with billing system. As always @cociu was the winner here with multiple crashes. At least he had good intentions
- No instant setup. Are we live in 1995 where "Bill" must manually setup virtual server? Prepare your automation for auto deploy. No excuse here! Fraud filtering can be done AFTER blackfriday event is over;
- Greed. Yes, this common and understandable sin of all humanity. When greed has no control there is situations like @ViridWeb and some more. Control your stock, limit quantities;
- Poor communication. No reply to simple tickets indicates that support/sales staff is non existant or just doesn't care;
Overall, as a provider blackfriday event should be seen as advertising campaign. 8 out of 10 servers bought will rot in idle or be cancelled at the end of billing period.
But provided experience to potential customer is here to stay. And when that customer will be looking for provider to build serious project he will go to that one, which was top notch during stress event.
Reputation is your business. This should be printed and hanged on the basement wall of all small/starting providers.
That's it. Feel free to add your own experience and insights which would help us all next year. We did it guys, we had phenomenal fun this Friday. There was no forum like this one. GG!
Comments
HostSlayer. They were only here to grab some quick cash to survive until next black friday.
You're welcome.
look , is the first time when i need to admit you have 100% reason , i have note this and next year will not happen , really i have not think will happen but wa happened ... so now i know what i need to do for the next year for BF , apart of this was go down only with the 1 eur offer wich was almost clear will hapen due of the quantity users trying to grab one.
Cheers.
Got hyped, grabbed one of their deals. Waited ~36 hours for provision, but I couldn't start the VPS.. Couldn't be bothered to wait for the support, asked for refund and went with another provider. I'm not sure if I'lll get my money back but whatever..
Did @VPSSLIM really cancel and refund your order or were you just impatient and initiated the cancellation yourself? Mine was delivered albeit a little late (~48hrs). However I do agree that it was poorly prepared for, it was also quite alarming when they kept taking in orders when they fully knew those orders wouldn't fit into the current nodes; I'm just glad they actually followed through and installed those new nodes to satisfy all those orders.
The case with @ViridWeb was a disaster but I think they didn't have malicious intentions, although forgetting to put limits on the coupon/product was a pretty simple mistake that could've been easily avoided. I just hope it's a lesson learned for them.
Imagine that this happens to you when you already have the service and not just about to order. They're holding the outage record on LET.
They're still spamming the same template from many years ago. Banned twice on other accounts, removed provider tag on the current one. Still allowed to post BF offers.
decrease?
nice wrap up, thanks
The fun part is that after these types of events you learn that some providers only have like two or three employees, at best, handling stuff and you need to wait for days for deployment and at least 24 hours for ticket replies...
No issues with @hosthatch for over an year now and @seriesn (NexusBytes) is prem, what issues do you have with them?
Occasional browser here recently registered, I have availed of a lot of the deals from racknerds but now am a little skittish given some of the content and anger I’m seeing regarding the owner and potential affiliations in the past. What’s the general consensus, did I make a mistake?
No. Mistake is made when you buy 150€ server and get scammed. With racknerd there will be fantastic fireworks. I still holding my grudge on alpharacks and don't expect much on cisnero new venture
. Time will show. I really hope for a nice drama...
Is it good idea to pay with credit card rather than paypal?
Yes, because you get rid of midleman. Of course credit card should be virtual if possible.
This is the most stupid and awful BF that i ever seen since 2012 here on LET.
PLEASE DO NOT MAKE ALL OFFERS IN 1 TOPIC, LET PROVIDER PREPARE THEIR OFFERS AND BE POSTED ON THE FORUM AS SEPARATE TOPIC. 1 thread = 1 provider BF/Cybermonday offer. I WANT TO ASK QUESTIONS, OR READ ANSWERS SIMILAR TO MY INTERESTS, instead of reading dozens of bullshit info on 10005000 pages.
Cannot make everyone happy.
You will be (very) surprised how much abusive customers this filters out. Most abusive customers want fast and easy service (of course some genuine customers too, like perhaps yourself). The little abuse that we get - we get it dealt with very fast.
I don't think you will find a single complaint about disk IO or network bandwidth on our storage VMs in the past 3 years. (yes, you will find some people with disk IO issues on NVMe servers - those are related to rare bad NVMe firmwares, not abuse)
Now compare that with the other guys selling storage VMs, even at 2-3x our price. You will find tons and tons of complaints and providers saying "it is bad because all customers are running benchmarks now" - but the performance stays bad for months and months and you are left lying to yourself about "well I guess mass storage servers are supposed to have 20MB/s sequential write, 25% CPU steal and take 3 minutes to run commands on the terminal"
The only two providers I know who come close to our pricing - one of them seem to be having the problems I wrote above with disk IO and their VMs being practically unusable, and the other one seems to have 30% uptime and daily strings of bad luck. I am thankful to them though, because they take all the customers who want fast deliveries so they can seed their torrents ASAP and leave the nicer customers for us.
Order by email is 1995 practice, not 2020. There is no excuse about that nor reasonable discussion. Sorry.
Not just replies, one of the host here has still not activated the BF deal I purchased on BF eve! It's been 48 hrs. Seems it's one-many-business and he's out with his friends for some booze! But I'm gonna wait bit more considering it was weekend and everybody needs a family-time.
Yes ok - I guess "sorry you are going to have a unusable VM for the next 2 months because too many customers running benches" is also alright then....it was cheap anyways, right? But at least it was ready with the 2020 style.
No. Not a mistake.
I too was aware of Quadranet/Alpharacks drama! I've read it all here and on other forums in the past! But if you look at Racknerd's BF thread, they got 300+ orders (approx), and if you see who all ordered, then those users are old-time LET users, with few occasional ones/new accounts, that is, most of them are very well aware of Dustin's past job, Alpharacks, etc. but at the same time people have shown confidence in his new venture and ordered a lot. I've seen people ordering 3 or more times too! Even I order 2 plans from him. I've been migrating my Reseller a/c from another provider to Racknerd. And yeah, I'll be hosting clients. So I'm most concerned about reliability, performance, support, and trust! And I had chatted with 3-4 users on LET who had placed order with Racknerd an year ago, and when I was satisfied that this brand seems legit, I placed the final order. Though I will not order anything more as of now, and will expand with more orders with him next year depending upon how everything goes. I'm quite positive that it will be good experience ahead.
1 CPU core (12.5% dedicated, burstable up to 100%)
2 GB RAM
20 GB RAID-10 NVMe
2 TB bandwidth (500 GB in Hong Kong and Sydney)
$15 per year
Hey, I missed all the flash sales, I wonder if this one has 30GB hard drive on sale? 20GB is too small for me
Thanks for this! It's quite reassuring, FYI your CPanel URL does not work, it ends up in a redirect loop.
classic hosthatch incapable of taking any constructive criticism
oh hey again - at least you didn't say 'lmao' this time, so you seem to have grown up a little bit since the last time you were seeking my attention (2 days ago?)
now you just need to stop asking mum for pocket money and grow up a little bit more.
peepee poopoo hosthatch bad leedle leedle
First world problems: I need to open a ticket to order an exclusive thing.
I wish that was my type of problems.
Sir,
I didn't do any such thing 
I feel violated
well ,I was waiting for bf to buy from ultravps.eu ,liteserver,php-friends,mxroute,servarica. and I got them .
Looks like it's working
Some providers are just too small to afford doing fraud check manually. They simply blocked a whole country just to get rid of a few spammers. They think their approach is superior because it's automated. They even automated the WordPress installation process! Let me guess, they must be living in the 2050s.
His is doing you dirty
@ViridWeb, any news about accounts deletion? They were supposed to be deleted from the database within 24 hours and although all panel details seem to be blank now I can still log into my account using the username and password I've set. https://i.gyazo.com/d2e0b652a6646943fe0ba4459cd553d0.png