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Thank you @jvnadr for your review of your Hostens experience. When long standing community members point out negative practices by hosts I tend to listen and learn.
I am not a Hostens customer, and now I will never be one.
Or I don't know- DON"T FUCKING SAY A PRODUCT HAS RECURRING PRICING when its dirt cheap. So many companies on here go through price squeezes. Like @seriesn said - price it correctly from the start. Also, 2000 customers at $10 a year is 20,000 - whats your net? Probably not enough to make shared a full time biz without offering other services. You most likely would get less 1000 customers first year. So yearly net is worse. Pricing low means you get the joy of full time support for beer money.
I have no idea what you're talking about but ok - Yes i'm sure there are some who have done huge increases and blamed it on the cPanel licensing (we certainly haven't and increased ours in line with cPanel licensing cost increases) - And my original response suggested that the price increase could well be down to that, however, and I make it clear yet again as I did in all my responses - I would have expected them to honour at least some form of discount still so that the increase was not as significant as it was.
If you're talking about me bringing up his attitude - I have no shame in hiding that we do not and will not take any shit off of any of our customers - period. No one gets paid to. If he opened a ticket with us with the attitude he has in this thread, he'd get a warning, if it continued, he'd get 24 hours to find a new provider before we terminate the account.
Attitude from customer when Hostens pretty much crapped all over them? Man you are out to lunch. Not even worth discussing. Any minute attitude from customer was due to a stupid increase without any courtesy of an email explaining it. Just an invoice- thats a shit way to tell a customer that hey, remember that discount- not gonna happen or the base price was sent to the moon so your cost after discount is really high now. Seriously- businesses that actually talk to their customers retain business. Your attitude about the customers response is asinine.
I've not once mentioned his attitude to Hostens? I've mentioned his attitude in this thread where he jumps down my throat and pretty much accuses the vast majority of hosting providers as using the cPanel price increase as an excuse to increase prices. Let's remember here that hosting providers took a 75% increase in pricing again from cPanel this year, so to make those accusations is damnright rude and disrespectful to the whole industry - I'm not saying that no one at all has done this, as there certainly has been, but to make such a response and phrase it in such a way - it's attitude, it's rude.
Again, my response simply pertains that if this guy, or any of our clients for that matter, came on our ticketing system with this sort of attitude, regardless of the reason, and persisted to act in such a manor - They would not be welcome on our services - No one deserves it, and no customer is entitled to act in such a way.
They took a 90 cent a year increase per account. And you would think the sky is falling. The problem is many providers raced to the bottom in their pricing. When a product is purchased from a vendor monthly- with nothing saying the price is fixed. Yet a company sells multiyear packages to a customer. Well the hosting company sets themselves up for a squeeze. Its not cpanels fault that companies sold items that they didnt have a contracted supply for. It was the short sighted hosting companies. You cant deny that selling something at a fixed price with a promise to the customer that that is always the price and not having a fixed price supply contract (cpanel, server, cloudlinux, etc) is utterly and forever stupid.
Now times that by how many cPanel accounts hosting providers have. 1000 cPanel accounts? $900 a year. 10,000 accounts? $9000 a year. It's a big hit in the grand scheme of things.
Yes I agree that significant price increases over and above cPanels and putting them down to cPanel licensing costs is stupid (and as I said earlier in this thread as well I thought OP said $3.24 annually orginally not quarterly, so I probably wouldn't have suggested it could be down to the cPanel licensing increase had I saw that) - But regardless of that it doesn't need or deserve the kind of direct response I got.
The point is the products were feasible at the time based on their outgoing costs clearly, and no one expected cPanel to suddenly jump to per account pricing either, an increase was always inevitible but not the sort of one that actually came about.
Regardless I once again wish OP the very best of luck in finding another suitable provider if he isn't happy with the outcome with Hostens.
And most providers still dont have fixed pricing with their vendors or own their own rigs- so the cycle is going to continue over and over of over promising and under delivering long term. People just have to stop saying thing s are recurring- they arent
except this host isnt new, I had an account with them 4 years ago, but left because of downtime, not pricing. Anyway, not new, nor are hostmantis and the various other hosts that've had this experience with, of not honouring recurring discounts.
However, in my case, I'll just leave and never return.
Out of interest: Who bought time4vps and Hostens?
As for @jvnadr 's horrible experience with them: So what? Nothing was really special (except untenable pricing), what he had can easily be found elsewhere and be replaced.
That is not to say that jvnadr should shut up, nope, it was good and valuable for the community that he did and obviously we should stay away from scammers like Hostens and time4vps
Funny sidenote: if @cociu 's hosting continues its evolution towards quality while keeping the very attractive prices the former underdog HostingSolutions soon might devour ugly siblings like those scammers, haha.
They were both acquired by miss group. They have lots of brands which seem to offer services that look to be very similar to each other.
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/167990/uab-interneto-vizija-time4vps-aquired-by-miss-group
Thank you. I just looked at their web site and in the first sentence they say that they offer ... "at favorable prices". And that's not even a lie, the problem just being that their pricing is favorable for them - not for the customers.
Want an example? Their cheapest VPS, 2vCores, 2 GB mem, 40 GB SSD, 3 TB traffic costs a mere $16. Per month. The name of that smallest VPS is "Premium", and the better products have names like "Premium Gold Plus". That alone, that naming, tells their story and it's about fleecing clueless customers.
Summary: Absolutely stay away from miss group and their brands!
Its actually a bait and switch. From the start you got bait. Now its time for the switch.
This company is known on not honoring their lifetime discount. What ever song you sing here it wont matter to them. They are just like that.
Run fast and find a new home for your site.
No.
Yes.
This provider is the main web hosting provider in Lithuania and perhaps one of the cheapest (if not the cheapest) in local market. For regular users, who have domains registered with them and also have cheap local DA hosting plans, all the management is a breeze. I suspect they have tons of DA lifetime licenses which they sell with their VPS. For foreign users they offer cPanel - the pricing and the support is arranged differently.
It happens when you saw that your server is running at a loss so you have to increase prices.
I agree world is not a charity, but capitalists rule the world.
there should be a reason for price hike, not just boldly "increase profit".
a reason? well, perhaps like electricity tariff increases, rent up, or whatever reason to back your fcking reason up to increase the price.
Actually, profit is a reason enough.
That's what companies are for after all.
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/167990/uab-interneto-vizija-time4vps-aquired-by-miss-group
They admit it LOL.
It was like a national value.. Sad.
FWIW: they are even proudly listed on the miss group web site.
Must have missed that. And they missed the opportunity to pick an appropriate name.
The provider has the right to raise the original price. And generally, costs are not fixed or linear or completely known, so it's moot about the percentage. It's really, is it still worth it for you at the new price?
However, the provider fucked up twice:
First, by not notifying the customer in advance of the price increase.
Second, by removing the discount percentage.
My understanding is that they're now reapplying the discount back, which is the right thing to do. I'm curious if they retroactively reapply the discount to everyone else affected or whether they're not treating it like a mistake but intentionally to get people to not realize.
For my phone and cable bills, their promotions are fixed discounts per month. That means they can still increase the base package $10 each year as long as I still get the $45/mo discount. But I'll get advance notice (1-2 months/bills in advance) and fixed discounts remain.
Thanks for the initiative mate. I was wondering to have hosting services from Hostens but now I would probably look into the other decent providers who consistently giving their services from a long time.
Sorry for this situation @jvnadr
The first mentioned invoice total change was because of failed VAT code validation. Because our system wasn't able to verify the VAT code in the VIEST VAT system it added 24% VAT from your invoice:
$2.69 + 24% = $3.34
So there is nothing hidden and everything displayed on the invoice.
At the moment I see that your code passes in VIES VAT system and I have added it to your account.
The second mentioned event was indeed a price reset to our prices seen on the website. It was done automatically and not taking into consideration discounts and promos.
Your order was placed with a 70% recurring discount and I have now corrected the service price and invoice total accordingly.
We do not run or try to evade anything and always take responsibility for our mistakes.
I apologize once again and if you have any questions just open a conversation on our website.
And for all tin foil hats - this has nothing to do with cPanel license pricing. We have changed pricing a while ago and introduced lower prices for longer periods and bigger prices for shorter ones.
I've checked the site and I found interesting thing - the world map with countries in which they have offices marked in green. Whole Canada with it's 50k islands is covered in green, so is US, but Alaska is not marked. The same with Majorka next to Spain. The same with North Ireland as for UK. As they state, that "Miss Group will focus on acquisitions in combination with organic growth with geographical expansion.", basic knowledge of geography would be a good starting point.
Their hole site is a mess wrt geography & countries. They say one thing (or two or three) about where they have locations and where their focus is but actually show something different and actually do yet something else in quite a few cases.
But then, why should we care? The only thing one needs to know about miss group is to stay away from them.
Here's one thing that I never understood though -- as time goes on, costs should decrease, right? If you are reselling dedis, for the same price in a few years, you can get a better dedi aka sell more VPSes for the same opex.
Newer CPUs operate more efficiently, increased automation means less payroll costs per machine, internet costs decrease over time (e.g. HE is now offering IP transit at $0.09/mbit!), etc. so logically, prices should decrease.
Newer software tend to demand more CPU and RAM. It may be marginal but it adds up.
Trying to be competitive also means offering more for the same or less price.
Lowend market is fucked up.
@lentro - logically prices should decrease ONLY IF cost of hardware and associated licenses drops more than the INCREASE in labor costs over time.