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So what you are saying is that you want to go from providers posting occasional loss leaders (these are the offers users are interested in) to everyone posting offers ads maybe twice a month (that no-one is interested in).
So if we assume there might be up to 200 providers that would be 400 ads per month or more than 10 ads per day - good luck with that one.
B-b-but, the number of posts are increasing! The user registrations are growing too! LET is on a healthy path to growth!
We don't want that and will track progress closely to make sure a balance is maintained.
Things are definitely up and have been for the past 18 months on LowEndTalk.
Yeah I plan to make an adjustment to this issue. I agree with you.
@Not_Oles
My two cents regarding:
I think that "rodeo" is a fairly culture-specific notion (in the US, it would be subculture-specific), hence not necessarily so easy to identify with.
The notion "roundup" is fine with respect to animals, and the photo that you provided shows horses:
But most people (and host reps) don't necessarily like the idea of being "rounded up".
In sum, I don't think that it's an auspicious choice of name/title.
If I were to make suggestions for a name/title, I might suggest:
Thanks for your help and insight!
I believe you might be right! However, maybe it's the offers that get rounded up and ridden, not the Host Reps! Maybe the name should be Host Rep Offer Roundup Rodeo?
Any Host Rep care to comment? I'm interested especially in what you Host Reps think since the whole idea is intended to benefit Host Reps.
Holy shit! What a value for the money! Im sure that all hosts who paid for the tag will love this and want more
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/178048/new-video-on-lowendbox-tv-today
They just paid for a RackNerd marketing video
but if they refuse then shame on them for not being able to afford it.
Instead of paying for a provider tag I clearly can't afford, I instead made a donation to another free-to-post forum and another good cause that surpasses the new fee amount here.
A good businessman would be able to use loss leaders in the new environment still.
I think most businesses are sour at the new fees and are scrambling for things to blame on it IMO.
Business is business. The playing field changes every second and so do the players and the rules. Just keep nimble and use some strategy to play the game at hand. Nobody enters the hosting market thinking it's easy money with no hidden costs around the corner.
lol, although someone pointed out the same and @jbiloh explained but this is the kind of shit that's driving the veterans, users & good providers away.
Already there's a sticky thread, already the purple daddy is allowed to spam, already he is being favored & overlooked (AlphaRacks scam) but now this?
@jbiloh dude, please listen to the community.
As I mentioned earlier, you're going through the hassle of making honey directly from flowers & shooing away the honeybees. Instead, you can just get it from the honeybees and be happy.
What you don't understand is, LEB & LET are different! The audience is different! Sounds absurd but you already know this.
I appreciate your calm attitude towards all this @jbiloh but I'll draw another analogy.
You seem to be one of those new young, just graduated B School, CEOs (running papa's family business) who have no idea what their employees/customers want, have no real ground experience, etc. but trying to bring in unnecessary changes to the company just because some idiot friend of yours at a dope party said it'd be fun & good to do so. Since you graduated from a B School, so you know the theory but have very little practical experience. Your advisors are just less competent morons and are least bothered about what happens to YOUR company as long as they are getting paid to be on the board.
Hope you can relate and this opens your eye. Don't try to fix things that are not broken.
Please don't ruin the forum.
This would be my last comment about this whole charade. Good luck @jbiloh
Hope you'll make the right decision.
If owner/staff can estimated monthly-year cost to operate all of this, maybe Donorbox with progressbar or patreon would be awesome from all member, provider and hostrep for this year (2022) ??
I suspect few here would be donating to fund LEB and the creation of ‘content’.
22K USD / Year so roughly 1833€/month is what he shared us.
LES runs on 2 cheap Hetzner VPS's
Go figure..
I can understand that many providers here are not exactly enthusiastic about the fee, but I think $200/year is not excessive, and if the reach of the forum can be maintained or even increased for that, I think it is reasonable.
But what I don't understand at all, and what makes me doubt whether providers should pay the fee, is the lack of consistency from the administrator.
Are all providers really treated equally here, or is it a matter of negotiation what conditions one gets? At least that seemed to be the plan at one time.
The reason it's become a topic again, is @jbiloh said he's using this money to create video content (among other things) to bring new users to LET.
Most of the community have agreed it's excessive, unwanted and uneeded but some in here (RackNerds) have been quick to defend him. It seems the issue isn't about the cost itself but what the money is being used for, and if the owner of LET deserves and has earned $200/year off the backs of low end providers and users. I think we all agree he deserves something, but he also made the mistake of sending out overdue notices from an unknown company without really notifying people. So it started bad to begin with.
The pressing issue is that now, after collecting, pressuring, bargaining, discounting, threatening and justifying it a thousand times to get the hosts money - the first video released was a RackNerd advertisement with a whopping 180 views (even with a giveaway).
No one likes an unnecessary fee. Less so when it is used to pay for advertising for a giant competitor.
Now to be fair @jbiloh is quick to argue on the topic - but it's just common sense to me... The team member making the video appears to have finished it, their salary isn't due until the end of the month. And @jbiloh is quite literally going to pay their salary with the money collected from the hosts. So the hosts, literally, paid for this advert via their hosting fees.
No one wants to fund their competitors and get nothing out of it for themselves.
I also think this is unreachable for him.
If he got 10 hosts to buy in at $80 each... He's sitting at a total of only $800 and a lot of angry people.
That's not even half of a single monthly target and (to make it worse) he now needs to wait 6 months to ask them to pay again.
With his math, he needs 220 hosts to pay him to break even - another 60 or so to cover the tax... And I don't see that happening.
Plus if each of them wrote an ad a month, that's a lot of spam.
My thoughts on what he should be doing IMO:
Anyway, I get that it's easy to criticize, but those are some of the steps I'd hope he starts taking...
Well, someone may or may not have been a direct beneficiary of Alphawoot scam and purple daddy shenanigans.
We are listening, and that's what has driven the number of changes over the past week to tweak the concept. All of that has been based on listening to feedback posted here on LowEndTalk.
Sorry to disappoint you, I didn't graduate a "B School" -- actually dropped out after six weeks. I started working at 13 and have been very fortunate that hard work, and luck, has allowed me the opportunity to found and run a couple different companies since then. I used to think that my career in IT was just 10 years, but it's actually about 20 years now (time flies).
I've been involved with LEB/LET for almost 10 years with the exception of about two years after I sold ColoCrossing. I've always had a soft spot in my heard for LEB/LET which is why I purchased it in January 2020 and began devoting so much time and effort towards it.
That effort hasn't been perfect but if you look at where things are now vs. back then, we've made a lot of change for the better. More of that is coming.
I agree that $200 per year for vast majority of providers is an excellent value and makes sense.
The issue with the initial plan is that it didn't sufficiently consider the smallest providers among our community who may find it hard to come up with even $1 for marketing purposes. So our adjustments since the initial rollout have focused primarily on limiting that burden (things like more capabilities for Host Reps, HR3, etc).
Overall I did underestimate the push back that would occur by asking companies to contribute 50 cents a day to one of their top marketing funnels. Interestingly enough, much of the push back is not actually from hosting companies but from a group of very passionate users. We all want the best for the LEB/LET platform, and especially me considering the money I've invested to buy it from the past owner and the significant time I've spent fixing things the past two years.
Relying on the stickied thread in the private providers section was not a sufficient means of communicating the new fee driven model. We did have an initial email that was auto sent when each account was created in WHMCS but that was not enough warning either. If I had a do-over I would roll that out much differently.
I have since tweaked the WHMCS settings on the overdue notices. I've never used WHMCS before this rollout and so I missed that setting.
We've been releasing videos on our YouTube channel for about a year: https://www.youtube.com/c/LowEndBoxTV/videos
Each time a giveaway is offered we publish a video about it. This includes giveaways sponsored by entities other than RackNerd.
Most of the videos are community news or tutorial centric.
The publishing of our latest giveaway video does not have anything to do with the provider fee rollout and is not part of the overall objective to hire an additional video content creator.
I don't think it's fair to say that hosting companies who maintain their provider tags "get nothing out of it for themselves." Even right this moment that is not true, and meanwhile we are acting on the advice received on LowEndTalk about enhancing the value for provider tag holders with new mechanisms and upside. Those draft ideas have already been shared in the provider section and are going to be shared to the general user base soon prior to rollout for community comment.
In my opinion many of these are good points and ideas. Plans to implement some of these are already under consideration, such as boosting the value for provider tag holders, a special provider tag, integrating LET and LEB more closely from a content/review/editorial perspective, etc.
I don't see anything wrong with the provider tag fee. But I think the integration could have been better. Having a separate system like WHMCS makes it hard to manage. I don't have access to my old email :P
Ah, never knew you went to B School & dropped out later, it wasn't meant to be personal in any way. I mean, I just wanted to let you know that perhaps there is more to running a community than just releasing videos & posts on LEB.
I wish you all the success with LET/LEB and since you cracked it with running multiple companies & exiting at the right time, I'm sure you'll be able to crack with running a community-driven forum too.
Appreciate the changes which have happened since you have taken over LET/LEB and the amount of effort you have put it. As I mentioned earlier, I feel bad that the hobby project is making a hole in your pocket - which is unfair as its a community-driven website and you have to bear the cost of sustaining it.
Hope you find that sweet spot that will help sustain LET/LEB as well as contribute to future upgrades/development.
These ideas sound so good and if implemented, would benefit a lot.
+1 to these ideas.
One strategy I used in business to give the companies I ran the greatest chance of success was listening to others. That's an important lesson I learned, thankfully, early on.
I am listening and I thank you for your thoughts and suggestions.
Plenty of community suggestions have been built in to our rollout the past week. And that isn't going to stop here.
This week will be a good one as we continue to tweak and improve things.
Yeah I'm not reading these posts anymore.
But people just assume deals on LET are a loss leader to try and upsell you for a higher plan. Yes and no. Yes as in they do want you to upgrade to a higher plan with better margins. No most of these offers are not loss leaders. There's no actual losses associated with them. Did you see BoomerHost's offers? They still make a profit (although imho very limited) and the guy's selling at very cheap prices.
Not saying all hosting providers can offer that level of pricing with their own level of service, but there are different economic incentives and logics at play. Literally rules of economics states that people won't do it if it loses them money.
Bingo.
My direct and indirect experiences says that nearly all offers on LowEndTalk are money makers. And I'd say in this regard, I have a pretty good feeling for it.
Now would it be safe to say that whoever has the Host Rep tag now has decided not to proceed with paying for the Provider tag, and the ones with the Provider tag have decided to keep their tag and will be paying or have paid?
Or will all this be clearer and decided by the 1st of April?
From the information I can glean so far, that much won't be possible to tell for sure untiil after the start of April. Anyone who hasn't reached out specifically and is just ignoring the invoice will likely find themselves stripped to Host Rep around that time.
I wouldn't draw any conclusions until some point in April.
Right now many dozens of providers have paid the fee.
I haven't read much of this thread. We haven't posted an ad on LET since the extra ads issue.
We still paid the provider fee as
I don't think any other hosting community is as Active as LET - imo partly because how the forum is structured as a set of threads instead of a list of categories.
@jbiloh as the owner has the right to make money from his asset regardless of the running cost.
The number 1 rule in running a business is to price your service it as per the value provided. Most Hosters make the mistake of pricing in one of 2 ways -
1. Cost + - add some margin to the cost
2. Competitor based - make it similar/lower than your closest competitors.
This has let everyone's opinion on the provider tag fee to be cost + margin instead of the value you get from being part of the forum and being allowed to advertise on it.