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It is quite common for many companies to list on their website many big names who are their customers.
That's a good place to be in though. Having people that you admire and respect using your service means a lot more than just being profitable. Doing both is having your cake and eating it too!
Isn't this pretty much the same thing with the web hosting industry? Just as most email hosting companies are charging based on the number of domains used and the number of mailboxes used, the large majority of the web hosting industry prices plans differently based on the number of domains used, ftp accounts used, inodes, email accounts and other variables that make no difference in cost to the provider whether the customer utilizes one or many.
There is a sliding scale of cost in parallel to usage, an account's cost to provide is relative to usage in all variables. But it's a fair bit lower than my average price when spread across all users. Most outliers don't add that much to the total per user though.
Other than storage and bandwidth, what other usage variables of individual customers make a significant difference in cost to the provider, whether in regards to email hosting or in regards to web hosting?
You might not guess most of them, and they're probably not all interesting, but here's an example of one you might not expect:
DirectAdmin creates a web server include for every domain (we use it for custom webmail virtual hosts). At a certain point those includes can grow to such a number that the web server effectively goes down every time a user adds a domain, because of how long it takes to reload the configs. Mine now takes a larger number than almost anyone else's DA server (meaning web hosting defaults will trigger this at a lower threshold than ours), but there is still a number.
So if someone wanted to, they could add a really large amount of domains at once to bring down DA?
I have ways of mitigating that. But everything still has a cost, mitigation for the worst case scenarios aren't without their own costs. But that's enough with trying to figure out how to break it. I never said this wasn't a uniquely challenging venture.
why would anyone buy a service just to abuse it? you guys are too paranoid
I think when you find any good service with a good price you would be curious to know what others say about it, and if you surprisingly find a bunch people suspended and writing bad reviews, you would be curious to know what happened...
being a total newbie when it comes to emails I can relate to many of these reviews as they seem to be written from a genuine perspective, I am a believer that as humans we are not perfect from making mistakes, and sometimes these mistakes come from our ignorance of the thing... most reviews I've read I could feel the pain of their posters, I don't think a person who do something intentionally will take much time to write a very detailed review, and as a normal user myself, I know well this to be true.
So to answer your question, as a user you can relate to other users like you, and you don't need to be that smart to tell if they are lying or not. So you start to question whether they were using much resources compared to others and they got banned for that, especially if you could see that they wasn't using the system to do harm and most likely something unintentional happened! and you are right, nobody buy a service to abuse it, but it's assuring to know your limits. How many hosting provider you know, says unlimited sites/storage/bandwidth/somethingElse to find out later that there is no such thing as unlimited! and once you get some heavy traffic you get kicked out.
Some for example were accused for spamming, and I think most of us here have zero interest in spam (and we may hate it more than jar himself) but did I knew that a regular form in a web page could be used as proxy for spamming, hell no!! until I read about it yesterday, and now I kind of see why jar is advising about double opt-in, so I could do stupid mistake just because of my ignorance and voila I am looking like a professional spammer
While I could understand that jar is operating from a business perspective (defending the reputation of IPS etc) I could also understand regular users (as I am a user myself and I don't know the least thing about how emails work), so if someone is accused of spamming while you can see it was some kind of ignorance, you may doubt that there is maybe another reason (like being a waste of resources to the service provider or something else)
So when you see others talking about abuse... they probably just want to be sure they could use the service whether they are small or they grow to a certain size. and they just want some level of tolerance regarding their ignorance of certain field, It's not because they have an attention to abuse it, life is too short to have a such goal, who wakes up in the morning saying: Yeah today a new day and all I want is to abuse someone else service
Well, since demonstrably there are people who spam (for money, typically), presumably these people wake up in the morning and intend to abuse someone else's service that day
Make sense, but believe me, being a tech person for over a decade, I still have very limited ideas of the ways they use to make money doing this. Never had much curiosity to go deep in the subject. Maybe this is why I am still naive thinking the world is a totally safe place. So forgive my ignorance.
Yeah, of course, it's paranoia that woke me up at 7AM yesterday (work late, sleep late). Totally.
You'd be wrong.
No you couldn't. You don't just trip, fall, and land on "Oops I accidentally sent 40,000 people an unsolicited advertisement for my company." Mistakes and spammers are two different things. Surely you're not implying that I can't know the difference, as that would be fairly insulting. I've been doing this for over a decade, I know a few things.
Except for literally all of the people who do exactly that every single day across the entirety of the hosting industry, something every single host on this forum can tell you stories about. Did you know there are multiple operations that exists solely to send phishing emails through various email providers? That they never stop trying to sneak in and blast them out? I do, and I deal with it every day in various capacities.
Ignorance about it is fine, and honestly a lack of ignorance on the subject would not likely improve your quality of life, trust me. I don't have that luxury though. My customers come first, and they have expectations about clean IPs, chances of inbox delivery, etc. A lot of them have been burned by mail providers that not only weren't proactive in preventing threats to those things for them, but many didn't even care about the things that threatened them. They wouldn't dare dip into their profits to help those customers. Quite a few of them came to me because I do care, I do proactively monitor and react to things that threaten their needs, and I always consider them to be more important than money.
You talk as though you are most empathetic toward those threats, but where's the empathy for the paying customers that those threats impact? Email is a service that absolutely demands that the ability to abuse it exist, for it to function within proper expectations. But clean IPs and high chances of inbox delivery require safeguards, monitoring, and a willingness to remove threats that could change as often as daily (spammers never stop evolving). Whether those threats have names or not (not that they usually give me a real one) is irrelevant. Threats which are blatant and not mistakes must be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Accidents and unintentional threats must be dealt with in an entirely different way. Knowing the difference is my job, and I don't think I can teach it to you in a forum post. Believe me I wish I could.
Couldn't resist this time. Last time when it was sold out I thought "Good, then I don't need to think about if I should get it or not.".
Anyway, seems stable so far, but if (and I'm hoping) @jar ever starts offering this in Europe again (and I noticed there is a server in London), I hope there is a similar deal or that @jar can offer a location change to the European server with some overlap so that I can move my data myself (and happy to pay for the location change).
@jar Possible to add backup payment cards?
Happy Friday and weekend everyone!
I don't actually spend a lot of time in hostbill as a customer, I have to confess, but I don't believe it'll do that.
Respect for what you do, I know by fact that it's not an easy job, I do a lot of tech stuff for many years and sometimes others think that what I do is easy, or that doesn't hide too much headache behind it,
as for emails I am sure you have your share of hard times and ups/downs... I think you are the only person to know the details of daily operations, u must know better than me certainly in judging people actions but I would say it's ok to hear someone else story...
these last 2 months I got a vps (and I admit I am not a sys-admin) and since I bought it I haven't the chance to use for 2 months in a row. The reason: the bandwidth was consumed before I even get my hand on it, and to be honest I still don't know how it happened, The host said that maybe someone hacked me and used it, but I just couldn't tell, life is hard these days and you are thinking about tons of other things every day, so you could do stupid things and so someone else exploit that and get hand on your machine or your account is a very possible thing,
if it wasn't a specific amount of bandwidth I was limited to it, I am sure the hosting provider would think I abused their service or even used it for bad (as it's a big chunk of bandwidth that was gone totally in an hour or less). But I swear I still have no clue what happened, sometimes I doubt they scamming me by giving me a machine and saying the bandwidth was consumed by someone else every month, especially that I never had a such issue in my whole career with other providers... and after I saw trustpilot flagged and removed their website from their listing my doubt has raised. I still 100% accept that I could be the main cause, but who knows?
Weird things happen in life and hearing the details from the other person could uncover things that we may not see without exchanging shoes. I am in no way saying that you couldn't differentiate between what is intentional and what's not, I am just saying it could be always a possibility to to miss the half of the story by only looking at the visible side of it.
I like how this thread/conversation goes, as it's an example of real take of what a user has in mind and what's a provider think as well. and I am learning so many things from it, I do a lot of side projects and it interest me to be in the customer shoes and write what comes into my mind, meantime I am thinking... wow that's how the customer see things, at the same time I am reading your answers and see another perspective, otherwise it's not usual for me to write long comments
Absolutely, but make no mistake. The difference between this and a user sending spam is a totally different thing. I'll give two examples, and I won't give any more than that because that might teach someone something that I don't want them to know, but I will give two examples:
Customer #1: Sending viagra spam from a single IP running a web server that was previously noticed to have sent emails from their website's contact form. Message ID logs "@www-data" at the end of each one. Upon check, their website is definitely hosted at the IP that sent them. I browse to their website and test their contact form, and I notice that I can send spam through it from them. Spammer or user who needs help?
Customer #2: Registers with business named "MyShittyBusiness" and adds these domains on day one:
myshittybusiness.com, myshittybusiness.co, myshittybusinesssmtp.com, myshittybusinessmarketing.com
Proceeds to send an email titled "MyShittyBusiness is looking for new customers" a recipient list of 10,000 that contains 60 invalid domains and 4,500 invalid recipients. User spreads out the emails across all 4 domains and uses randomly generated envelope sender addresses to bypass sending limits. IP used to send the emails is the same one the user registered with in our billing portal. Our feedback loop receives a copy of the emails as reported spam by a recipient at a recipient provider, we open that abuse complaint and see very clearly that MyShittyBusiness just sent out a list of products and prices to people who never requested them. Spammer or user who needs help?
You say listen to people's stories, I say I already have their stories. What infuriates Customer #2 is that they don't get to gaslight me on it because unlike their previous mail provider, I'm actually monitoring for them and I have all of the facts in front of me. I think that's the emotion you are tapping into. I'm telling you, that's misplaced empathy. My empathy goes to Customer #1 and the victims of the bad actor formerly known as Customer #2. I end up with an extreme lack of empathy for Customer #2 because they tried to harm the service I sold to Customer #1.
Anyone could tell the difference in this situation, even me who don't know a damn about how emails work, If I see the same behavior as Customer #2 I would block them immediately even if I consider myself a nice person
But what about a person being a normal user for 1 or 2 years sending normal emails, then one day something unusual happened? tons of spams sent from their account! and could even have many domains created that days and spams started to go out from there (same behavior as customer#2)
I think I've read some people complaining about that exact situation, where maybe the password was compromised.
You've only heard users claim that when they were in fact Customer #2 above and thought they could lie about it, when they passionatly refused to stop using the same compromised passwords over and over again, or when the number of tickets about their security kept rising for months and they didn't respond to the tickets. Every day 1-3 customers fill in a phishing form somewhere (or get a computer virus) and their accounts are used to send spam. I have a whole ticket queue that shows I only abandon those users when they continually fail with their own security and have proven themselves, usually over the course of a year or more, to be incapable of keeping their passwords to themselves.
In fact, a huge portion of my daily work goes to protecting exactly those users. In almost every case I'm able to detect it and lock them down before they actually send spam, something no other email provider is doing. That's a reason I would take personal offense to any of them suggesting that I didn't have their back on that topic.
Some of the users I've caught when they were compromised, and worked with before they were used to send spam, are even well known LET providers. But if I weren't working with these people I'd have 1-3 bad reviews every day.
Got it, and make total sense to me, if I am a customer and I receive an email from any provider warning me about a security issue, I would take action in no time. Some people are careless unfortunately, and if you warned them again and again without feedback from them, there is no excuse 100%. I personally read my emails at least once a day, so I would act in that 24 hours period depending when I read the notice.
A suggestion maybe:
I would never know what happened if you didn't explained it. Thank you!
Darn! the small package ran out of stock. That's too bad.
Great deals though
WOW! A great Black Friday offer that is still active!
It’s just straight up doubling revenue this year. It’s all sustainable too. I’m just gonna milk it and stockpile money to pay its bills.
I'm the last guy to understand business financing and pricing strategies, but is the Medium plan that much more sustainable than the Small plan?
Think about it. Would you rather get $15 for sending no mails or $30 for sending no mails. It's pretty much a no-brainer.
I can't disagree with that master strategy. But, on the other hand, if there's no mail anyway why not also capture the low-end market that maxes out at $15?
That's simple. It's because people will drool over the $15 plan, see it's out of stock, sob for a bit and then get the $30 one to cope. It's all about the psy-cho-lo-gy!
Keeping the Small BF plan out of stock keeps out most of the Chinese v2board users.
It would be great if the small plan could be restocked. I really want the small plan. I can’t use up the medium plan. It feels like such a waste.
I sold 1500 of the small packages. I don’t think I’ll restock them but I’ll keep it in mind for next Black Friday, no promises.