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Able to grab one. @PulsedMedia thank you so much! Happy 12th page!
I personally using
sshfsto mount as drive.Happy 13th page to you!
as we upgrade hardware eventually old hardware gets dropped off from new provisioning, then your bonuses start to grow. Then eventually we move you to a new hardware with new potential, but provisioned bonus drops to 0GiB at that point tho
It's not guaranteed and still has some draw of luck in play, but considering we just saw 200GiB taking weeks to provision chances are good. About ~25% bonus for average user!
Yes marketing wise larger number better, but technically it would be incorrect
seedboxes are a bit support heavy niche too, and extreme on the resources side - so low margin to start with. Also cannot hide behind TOS like "no support", we tried that many years ago, disastrous results. Hiding behind TOS never good thing.
Even "unsustainable deals" there has to be a kernel of sustainability in there. We'd like to celebrate 24th anniversary too, without any involucrations in between
But i am glad you are pushing the envelope. For us even the 8$/Month is very difficult to handle for every day deals (in my book weeks minimum on offer).
Yes and trivial. SSHFS, rclone, expandrive etc etc. anythign that can mount SFTP for example.
That's insane! We have nothing which even electrical is below that cost -- even our 1RU cost is above that.
We have noticed SSHFS is very unstable tho, but then again we have HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of mounts. Works fine if you got just a few and servers always stay up. The moment mounted server has any issues your host/mounting server is gonne become a bogged down POS.
We went with internal no caps because then it's not that taxing at all btw. External network sure thing, but not internally. We like to keep internal network as uncongested as possible, sometimes to a detriment on the balance sheet.
For me it is more about celebration and sometimes about giving back, this is what makes this place a community, I would have gotten much more if I only care about money
I didn't mention anything about hiding in TOS, it can be written plain in the
specials.phppage instead, just like how you mentioned about it being non-recurring.Anyway I do understand business is business and not charity, so I am perfectly fine with it being one-time. This is the similar concept for both buyers and sellers, buyers want to reduce recurring payments that's why we prefer recurring offers, sellers also want to reduce recurring operating costs that's why you prefer one-time offers.
I have no hard feelings, just expressing my concern over my view of it
This deal just makes me rethink of my strategy, I always thought of getting recurring offers to build a long-term relation with the provider, but sometimes getting the one-time off might be even more worth it, you also don't have to risk the recurring price changes during your one-time term 🤔
Let's say a hypothetical scenario:
Which one would you choose? 🤔 Comparing the "ROI" it seems first one is good for at least 2 years, before the second option is more valuable in a long run.
True as much! 1.01€/Mo is just that. We actually take a loss on that, heavy one at that too when talking about %.
That is hiding behind TOS actually, support is always expected. Cannot bypass that sadly.
Regardless, we prefer to offer regular support and avoid the headache of determining who gets support and who does not.
We don't want to remove basics & fundamentals at all for the specials, and aim to treat the same everyone. Except it's almost impossible, something about human subconscious, you see low € value on the service and you get way more easily bothered and annoyed @ helpdesk side. But that's besides the point and another lengthy discussion.
Indeed, in that sense it is "2 sides battling each other" ... but yet not really. This community gives us SO much, and at our cost structure even @ 2€/month/service is essentially a loss leader. Everything but electricity, cooling and bandwidth is expensive in Finland. One of the highest taxed countries in the world. For regular things 5-6€/month is a pain threshold, one time payments anything below is 10€ is a bit painful as paypal alone will take something like 7-11% of that ... I'm not even joking.
But we need these 2 sides, and this kind of stuff pushes the envelope. I think with these anniversary specials we found the sweet spot where the community and our cost structure meets quite nicely. Definitely extremely low margin, but the business case for us in these specials is building market recognition AND concrete foundations; a baseline of recurring revenue we know people will most likely keep for the next decade -- then profit margin short term becomes way less relevant and we can do full loss leader lineup
While we broke many records already on these specials, daily revenue is not one of them.
Like you said, some things are immaterial. This community provides us so much more than the revenue suggests. Hence the namesake specials, without this community we would not have dared to offer them. They are below our cost basis for the first 3-6 years.
Thanks for your feedback, your insight into the market is always appreciated and provides some guidance
Depends the use case scenario here.. If its setup and forget the 2nd one will be better option. But as we know every year we get better deals for less money so the 1st one is valuable option also. The main thing is hardware here.. Every year providers upgrade to newer hardware for same or less money on the new deals..
One thing I have found there is always deals, even if its a one off use it enjoy it and don't over think it.
I fully understand that, I think the problem is not everyone can manage their expectations, for me personally at this price I don't mind waiting weeks for a reply / resolution.
That's kind of unintuitive to me, I didn't study in details but I have the impression that Hetzner / OVH provides services from Finland at a low cost too so the cost should be reasonably manageable, but seems like the costs have gotten too high nowadays.
Anyway, this community is build on top of low endso I can understand the profit margin can be quite limited
But there's also inflation, to me I feel the hosting pricing nowadays in US/EU is already at the bottom and will most likely not getting any lower anytime soon in the next few years.
With that said, a lot of things can change in a few years and if Moore's law still hold then ya probably it can still go lower.
Good point, I should learn to enjoy it more
Nice to see not just our (my) views are not being challenged here
It can feel quickly annoying when one's views are challenged, but that's how we learn and progress 
To muddy the waters even further on this is that we offer the free bonus storage, on average 25% per service. Further due to how seedboxes and our backend stuff works services get relatively faster the longer you keep them -> less users per server with less activity on average.
This is why our retention rate long term is extremely good for the seedbox niche. We've always been the underdog from the get-go, we began our journey with 9€ investment and 19€ loan. When i started Pulsed Media 12 years ago i could not even afford WHMCS license. Not even kidding. On the first year i even had to sell my car to afford more servers as our first French server provider scammed us for quite large sum of money. I personally spent months on extremely tight "mac & cheese only" budget to get things back on track, but still managed after 6-8 months to turn this into full time thing, and since 2013 we've had our own DC, and from about 2018 we finally let go of the last rented dedi server and were fully on our own hardware, fully income/self funded.
Our competitors has been like bulldogs on the other forum against us, then boasting how they had record low churn rate for the month, and while our worst ones barely exceeded that.
Even our upstream providers keep telling us there is no sense on running on this business, and we should do something with higher profit margin. Yet here we are, year after year getting better
-Aleksi
Scale, it's all about scale. We are small business, so fixed costs are relatively much much higher. Hetzner has economies of scale on their side by multiple country miles. We have to innovate that much harder, work that much smarter and harder to even get at the same starting point. AND we cannot, Hetzner has some insanely good supply & financing contracts, we did the maths their typical dedi has 24+ Month on HARDWARE ALONE. Add everything else on top of that ...
Inflation indeed, it's been a pain point for us already, and our relative pricing has actually been spiking here and there.
Moore's law does not help on HDD IOPS at all. Does nothing for it, so the minimum rate is climbing one needs to charge if it relies on HDDs.
Few of the "reservations" cancelled again! A few more of the Very @FAT32 available again
For some reasons this turned into a lengthy discussion, sorry I am on my mobile now so cant type much.
This story of how Pulsed Media started reminds me if anyone havent read PulsedMedia interview they should: https://lowendbox.com/blog/interview-qa-with-aleksi-ceo-of-pulsedmedia/
Keep up the good work! It is always great to hear a provider who are passionate and work hard
Despite I am not a customer, I like your free bonus disk policy a lot, it is something to encourage old users that I rarely see it in other providers. What I see most of the time is existing users got a bad recurring price with outdated specs but new users get the new low pricing with the most recent hardwares, but this bonus disk policy balanced it pretty well.
I have the 12GB server but when I look at the df -h I see:
/dev/md1 29T 26T 3.4T 89% /homeIs this a problem?
No.. thats for the whole disk.. You should use quota for your tb's
Thanks! It's extremely rare anyone ever mentions this, i don't think this is even the 10th (!!!) out loud said appreciation of that program. First few years we just got complaints about it, go and figure oO;
BUT you cannot fake statistics, and looking at those we always knew people actually appreciate it. People just don't talk about the positive stuff.
We have always as well been silently from public upgrading old users to new specs and new hardware at a slow pace. When hardware fails, or we need to get the oldest hardware out of the way to upcycle the servers (swap larger drives, do full QA routine and then back into production)
It's all of these silent little things which contributes on the industry leading churn rate. Our competitors publicly celebrate if they reach 7% monthly churn -- ours rarely hit that high churn (only after huge specials), and sometimes hit below half of that. Yea, seedboxes are super high churn rate niche.
Nope, our automation makes space free as it's being used. Looks like that server ought to get 600G-1.6T free on the next 24hours or so.
Exactly this, let us worry about the whole array
If the whole array hits below 200-500G free then there's a problem, just open a ticket and we'll get right on it
Thank You everyone. We definitively broke the 1 day orders record, and 1 day revenue too winded up being on the top 25
@PulsedMedia grabbed a @FAT32 special and so far impressed with delivery and speed.
Happy 12th
Arrived late and all products are sold out
Was not first in line in for the 12T in the end but glad i got one.
Grabbed one. Congrats!
Check below the first line of services. The first line is raffles
I know this has been mentioned before but often http does not re-direct to https on your site, this is even when clicking on purchase links. I had to manually add in the https before checkout. Am using firefox.
+1 For Me. Also, I constantly get logged out from the billing panel for like every 30 seconds.
Congratz & Happy
btw: The quarterly Astro's MEGA deal is advertised with only 1,2GB memory on the specials page
whilst it shows 12GB mem on whmcs
Thanks - grabbed a 12TB box and starting to seed S**Hub. Wish you guys all the best.
Took a 12th Anniversary Community Astro's MEGA, thank you!