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Concerns about the rise of dummies when it comes to cheap deals
Lately, I've been sitting here on this platform looking around for cheap deals to see what's on our market every now and then. It strikes me very often that there are all retards who make a big deal out of everything while paying maybe a tenner a year for their VPS.
As an example, lately HostSlim for example has launched some cheap deals resulting from the unknown number of orders 2 threads on them. All 2 of these threads occurred because the customer did not know what they were doing.
You can destroy a company's reputation like this for no good reason by creating a thread. Often these also unfortunately stay up, and I have been scrolling through the hosting community for a hell of a long time. This can demolish the reputation with subsequent offers, for example, or generally making the company less profitable.
Maybe companies should just not offer something cheap then? It will save them more by just taking on "enterprise" customers who don't make an issue out of everything due to knowledge they don't have. Those won't feel impotent so easily.
How would you challenge this yourself as a hosting provider, should a client not behave and do you also think this should not be allowed just like that?
Okami
Comments
I imagine for every 1 loud whiner there's easily minimum 20 silently happy customers. I don't think companies should be discouraged by a vocal minority. Some people will always complain no matter what; this is like the truth of humanity at this point.
Or someone complaining that their OVH VPS once got 2,6 k geekbench and once 2,3 k
And tagging 3 OVH staff over it
(Just an example, nothing personal, just seen the same kind of thing A LOT lately)
The funniest part is that I’m confident the same people who care so hugely about the exact YABS benchmark and the 10 gbit speed because singe digit gbit is for losers
Are the ones running a hello world apache html
I've been in the hosting business for over 20 years and the loudest people were never the biggest customers. Most people are smart enough to know when complaints are valid or not. It does clog up google results with negative results, but it tends to average out if you keep people happy.
Drama...sometimes it is fun reading those threads...
Companies can also mitigate a lot of the risks by not selling to '111111 11111'
yes (in regard to the title)
You seem rather invested in defending hostslim in particular, why's that? I can understand liking a product or service, but why go out of your way to defend a for profit company? Can't/shouldn't they do that themselves?
Maybe they're just REALLY happy about the services they're getting? It does seem weird but I can understand wanting to stick up for a company that's providing stable service.
Few reasons may sit behind:
Since community must balance between good drama and bs topics, mods will (probably) investigate OPs account and if everything is ok, we will have a hope for good drama topic.
Your mistake is assuming that these threads actually damage businesses. Often, they do the opposite. I can vouch for that with experience. Seeing how someone handles shit quite often tells me who I want to consider doing business with.
This too, the way companies respond to the idiot threads are what really makes me decide if I want to deal with them or not.
Considering that this thread appeared in response to the idiot who abused and then screamed for a refund, I personally think that giving a refund to an abuser it means encouraging him to do the same until he is no longer caught. (we don't care about consumed resources which can be limited at host level but illegal content, SPAM, scans, DDoS, etc.)
As long as they show up here and receive the breadcrumbs they paid for before abusing, I see no reason to organically stop this trend.
I originally had something not so subtly implying these things but decided it wasn't appropriate because I have no proof and I'm not into baseless accusations
¯\_(ツ)_/¯I was thinking it too though, wouldn't be that unusual around here. If I'm wrong that's fine too though, probably good even.This is what I thought too personally, it's why I said shouldn't they be the ones dealing with this, they don't need their customers to White Knight for them I'd think.
My only complaint about hosts in general in those kind of threads is how they share their perspective literally sharing private client information
Morally, they’re able to, the client lied about them publically
Professionally, it’s still wrong
retard threads are entertaining. more drama = better
just my $7
Brutal honesty. If we messed up, I hope it never even makes it to LET because myself or whoever is responding to that ticket goes above and beyond without needing to be coaxed. Aside from that, we had a false negative thread months ago from a similar situation where he tried to blackmail us with threats of going to LET and wherever else. Encouraged him to post. Head-on, no-holds-barred response necessary. We're not Walmart, and we don't want customers who think we are. Will we do extra when we can? Absolutely--we just can't blanket promise it.
I also don't think there's an issue with targeting some real good low-end deals. In our experience, we generally get 50+ excellent customers for 1 bad apple. No need to punish everyone else who wants a deal.
Additionally: I think the mods here do a pretty good job balancing real feedback versus attempted hit-and-runs. I felt the way they handled ours was very appropriate.
Fairly accurate. I like to think we're relatively generous with our bandwidth, but there has to be a limit to prevent that 1 abuser from hammering all resources at 2AM and disrupting legitimate production clients. I can't tell you how many times potential customers warn us about their bandwidth usage, we come up with a package that works for them, and 3-6 months later I check in to make sure they're still good and see they average 5% of what they told us they absolutely would use. Not a big deal, but I think the "your eyes are bigger than your stomach" motto is way more true than anyone wants to believe and a really solid 1Gbps from a reliable provider is still tons of bandwidth/capacity.
After Looking at our load averages, let's just say I fully understand the attraction for some providers to "oversell". When your full hypervisors average 0.89 / 0.82 / 0.81 load and you have the time/manpower to monitor and manage it, I bet the service would be a nearly identical experience to the end user.
Agreed. Got sales off ours. It's an excuse to get in front of more customers and show exactly how you handle situations and what type of ship you run.
There's no reputation left anyway if you sell for that cheap so I don't personally see the issue.
You reap what you sow. Only retards, kids, and needy people without money or common sense will get those 12-20 USD/year deals and expect it to perform like a dedicated server.
Might as well give for free at that point or add "no support included" or "Support @ LET drama thread" condition.
We are literally on “Low End Talk” forum. I don’t think banning cheap/low-end VPS provides is a good idea
I think we need to mandate a license that verifies you're capable of understanding how VPS's/dedi's work in the low end.
Anyone caught with a suspended, revoked, or nonexistent server operator license should be subject to a $69,420 fine and/or 7 years in a federal prison.
This may be a bit off-topic, even though I already have the server I need, I do go back to lowendtalk from time to time to check it out.
Sometimes it's to get some sweet, juicy deals, but sometimes it's just to see the arguments.
Especially for merchants - those that I buy from. I want them to be active on the forums from time to time - so I can see how real people behind the company are commenting on something.
It's very rewarding.
As a user, always dealing with specific vendors.
It's the art of balancing how to ensure quality and also price. I'm happy when I see that behind the service I'm buying are people with brains, weighing the two carefully.
At the same time, I remind myself of this when I make a purchase:
There is no such thing as perfect, but you can still get what you want - as long as you know what you need.
The ultimate winner will always be someone with normal life experience, and a brain.
First of all, non of us here are 'normal'. We are server addicts who love to run Yabs. We are obsessed individuals.
As for the brain, it is up for debate on what capacity of said brain we here on LET use. I'll run some Yabs on mine and tell you what GB scores my brain has, but I doubt it's a lot
For sure, offers are boring and drama is entertaining.
Drama brings attention, attention brings sales.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Some of the people that come across you won’t like you but others will, the important thing is that they come across you to make that decision.
A sinking ship?
Titanic taught us that every ship will eventually sink.
ToS should state:
You are accessing a Unnamed Provider information system.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communications or information used, transmitted, or stored on Unnamed Provider information systems.
They can then legally publish any ticket.
Everyone wants a piece of the low end market, that's the price providers need to pay. Make sure you serve target audiences instead of pleasing everyone.
I do not defend HostSlim in particular, they are just at this time we're speaking the ones taken as an example for this thread.
There are no retards on LET, I never saw any myself. Everyone here has their unique set of skills and expertise in some specific areas. Actually this forum has the highest concentration of technical talent I've ever seen online. Otherwise I wouldn't be here in the first place learning from my fellow peers.
Please be respectful of everyone's budgetary limitations. Not everyone was born in the USA and has 100 bucks to shell out for a VPS.
@raindog308
Last one is unreslistic
”Seems fair”
He’s most likely posting a 700-word thread about the lack of respect shown by xyz host
Guess what we did?
After years and years being market leader on cost efficiency and value, inflation, energy crisis on top of all the negativity just became way too much.
Interestingly enough, the ensuing negativity just reaffirmed our decision to avoid leading on cost basis, for now. Not only does it make you extremely sensitive to OpEx, but your reputation is completely ruined unless you cave in to ~every single silly demand, to what is known in customer care industry as "customer asking to get their butts wiped @ the toilet" level of demands. That is universal across any customer care, in any industry btw.
For us, it is better for now concentrate on other areas than trying to offer lowest € amount services. Ironically, the thing we are working on will actually deliver exactly that, but without sacrificing operating margins.
What makes matters worse, these 10-30€ a year deals, they essentially make zero profit. You are not selling infrastructure at that point, you are selling human labor hour to hour, with much bigger risk.
20€ a year deal just to cover single rack at Hetzner (250€/Mo) would could require you to sell approximately 900 accounts. That is before the hardware investment, electricity, transit etc. So in reality we are talking more like 9000.
Further, these bottom dollar offer seekers are very disloyal. someone offers 0.01€ less, they will jump ship, meanwhile your hardware ROI is at 4-5years and you need to continuously offer more for less (race to the bottom).
Granted, we work on the toughest niche there is: Seedboxes.
We would be 5x more profitable offering VPS services. Seedboxers all use resources, even the mildest customers, more than the typical VPS. Meanwhile we have to maintain 100% of our software, frontend and backend since there are zero viable alternatives. Bandwidth utilization, I/O utilization is all through the roof in comparison to average VPS.
Yet the expectation is that we would sell for less than VPS, and the niche is very very shallow compared to VPS niche, AND just a mere shadow of what it was a decade ago.
But we got really really proficient in doing this, and you don't turn a big ship on a dime to another direction. To start offering VPS with the known Pulsed Media touch now requires heavy investment in hardware, with unknown returns and unknown unknowns. So the project we are working on now is closer to home instead of VPS.
For us at least the ratio is more like 1:200.
If you google us, almost all you see is complaints and negativity. Then how come we got customers who has been with us for nearly 14 years (from launch), in the highest turnover rate niche there is (seedboxes)?
Just last night, this is something someone said:
I think we might be the only one still on seedbox niche with SLA, one of the very few with redundant offers, actually reaching gold level support response times (below 6hrs) and first reply full resolutions a lot of the time, yet because we catered to the lowest cost possible, all you see is complaints.
Further, because you are doing offers your competitors simply cannot match, they will put a lot of effort in trying to persuade customers away from you, legally or not so legally. DDOS, Spam attacks, false reviews, false flag ops etc etc. are all common occurences.
One competitor we refused to sell our business to, they started quite a big DDOS, with 0day exploits as well. Another one had paid employee who's seemingly major portion of his job was just to harass us. Another competitor spent more time harassing us than building their services (now bankrupt, surprise surprise). etc etc etc.
Bottomline: The lower your pricing is, the tougher it gets all around.
We had ~decade ago a customer who demanded 1Gbps dedicated line for himself @ 10€ a month or bad reviews will ensue XD
Decade ago 1Gbps cost as much as 10G these days.
True.
I don't outright recall any significant spender who would have ever made a negative review about us, not a single one. They all have been on the lower end of spectrum, single service to my recollection.
That being said, there are also very tough customers in the higher spending bracket if you are category leader for cost efficiency, but they are far less and generally they are not as tough as those spending only 5€ or less a month.
This is it's own group indeed. I think we had even here a negative thread about abusers getting stopped. Abuse comes in many forms as well.
Agree 100% here.
We are very very careful not to reveal anything private publicly ever, even to the point of reputational damage and have always been so. But also calling out bullshit when they finally publicize themselves but omits details.
Tons of wasted time tho, and you had to negate that stuff with your hands tied behind your back, since even their privacy matters to us. Even the worst abusers/scammers privacy matters to us.
You win a candy for that. Dingleberries or Schmutz & Mint?