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A quick "google search" would have cleared that up. The information i quoted is public...
My post corrected. Thank you for notice.
I mean, $1,000 isn't much for a business. Annually, you'll pay more for WHMCS, in ARIN fees, etc for most.
Not that I'd ever pay $1,000 to post offers here, especially when the audience wants everything for peanuts.
scammer can scam even by paying $1000 tag fee.
its customers who should take precautions by carefully screening the provider and their history (if any) and should first pay monthly, and avoid "higher specs, lowest prices" types of plans sold by such providers if they don't have a good reputation for minimum 3 to 5 years.
Can you provide very rough, obscure estimation how much do you spend on marketing alone outside LET?
By the way, if you are a small business owner:
To rely on LET/LEB as a single source of marketing is a huge misstake. Because if you taint your reputation here - you will loose your clientele and go belly up.
Next to nothing.
I pay Twitter ( https://x.com/IncogNETLLC ) and sponsor some privacy projects that link back to us. Most of our business is from word of mouth and direct website sales at normal website pricing, which is why I'm not usually very eager to do deals here usually.
EDIT: I guess there is Canva and a couple other small tools that could be classified as marketing, but still: More or less nothing.
@jbiloh - it seems you might want to increase that fee to $1000 starting next year. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
If you want high quality, sustainable offers, for larger plans then it’s not the fee that needs changing - it’s the price limit.
We've been around the block for a while. I don't think increasing the provider tag fee is going to resolve any problems.
What's the solution? Good question. I don't know exactly what the solution should be, but I think it has to be a partnership with the community staff and the readers. There's an educational component (readers need to be aware of what's a common scam or what kind of pitfalls to look for) but also the staff could maybe spend more time giving information about potential signs of shakey vendors.
However, at the end of the day, you can't offload all of these risks to the community staff and expect them to take care of it for you. At the end of the day, it's your money and it's your data, not LET Staff's. Sure running the site costs money, but it's not 50k/year in patron providers + ad revenue enough. LET by itself probably generates around 100k+ a year anyways. it's not a lot, but it's not nothing. It's not enough to hire someone full time to actually manage it anyways without eating into the profits.
Basically, this long-winded post basically says I don't think increasing provider tag fee resolves anything. It simply tries to target a symptom of these problems not the actual root of the problem. At the end of the day, the money hasn't gone to the staff or enough resources have gone (imho) to addressing this. But this is the product LET is selling to the community and providers and so far everyone's accepted it. I was originally a fan of the fee but the fact that nothing has changed but just more barriers to entry shows me that the current agreement (pricing vs value) has really happened. So I don't think throwing more $$$ at them is the solution.
While in general i fully agree i see nothing wrong with taking a shady long term deal from an unknown host as long as one fully acknowledges the fact that it might not be around for the whole period and even until then quality could easily be literal shit. Basically if one takes such an offer it's a nice service to the community evaluating the host but there isn't any reason to cry a lot if things don't go overly well.
Around 43% of votes goes for price increase.
Of 113 as of me writing this, that is a strong base for statistics on a huge forum like LET.
100% accuracy.
Even 10 votes count in democracy. Everyone has freedom to vote or not.
I still think scam insurance is the key here. Either include it in the provider tag price (with an increase to cover it) or have it as a premium that must be paid.
Anyone refusing or objecting to the scam insurance when they apply for the tag will be marked as a scammer.
Yea, right. Those who can afford to pay $1000 can never scam? I mean, seriously? Two years ago, it was $200. What’s next? Those with $10k can’t spam? Sounds like a conspiracy to keep only big players and get rid of actual LowEnd hosts. Tags like “Patron Provider” and “Host Rep” have lost their meaning. If anything, reduce the tag fee and charge all providers who want to sell something a nominal fee. Introduce some new tags based on company size, years in operation, community trust level/rating, or any attributes that cannot be bought by money, and let the buyers also do their due diligence based on those tags. From a moderation perspective, limit the number of times a Newbie host with little or no community trust is allowed to spam the shit out of megathreads and create new sales threads. Not very good from a money making standpoint but might help save the community. My 2 cents.
To be honest i'm not very keen on the insurance thing (i simply don't need it) but i'm not really against it much either (as long as it isn't the $800 increase in disguise and somewhat affordable to small hosts). The only problems i see is that it'll put a lot of responsibility/administrative effort on the forum owners (like we really care, lol) and it'll lead people to become even more reckless as being ignorant is now covered by insurance, right? On the other hand all the drama that will ensure when insurance doesn't fully cover the loss and people obviously thought everything was risk free now and they didn't need to think for a second before hitting the order button will be nothing short of priceless.
I re-read my post and holy shit. The idea is solid but the writing needs editing.
That's the thing. This doesn't solve anything. What the community/people expect is the staff to be the filter and if problems occur then the staff is to blame. In reality, this isn't going to happen.
I mean even the 200 dollar fee was put in place by @jbiloh with notes of support for deeper review. What I've seen so far is that most of the staff on the forum are still volunteers/unpaid (or so it seems) and while new rules are applied, at the end of the day, no-one specifically is being compensated/asked to spend more of their time looking into each potential vendor.
The level of promised increase and the actual seen does not justify increasing the cost of membership. In my perspective, it's a failed experiment and it doesn't work. We were all hoping for higher quality moderation, more quality time spent on vendor reviews, and overall a better community experience. With one of their latest posts about how they have about 250 paid vendors that comes out to $50k/year just in Patron Provider revenue. Adding in the cost of advertising (and BSA usually takes like 50% cut), LET website makes a few pennies a year.
As the "product" being sold (it's your attention as community members, engagement, and access to you that they're selling), you'd expect a substantially better quality experience. However, it does not seem to be this way.
I also understand there's a difference between what's being publicly shown vs what's going on in the backend, but at the end of the day I'm making a judgement call based on what I see and, honestly, I don't see the value.
That 200$ fee was put on better server(s) for the forum and majority of money was syphoned to LEB. Alternative traffic generator. Money paid for content writters.
Everything else landed in forum owners pocket.
Increased fee would fund more of these activities and probably paid admin/mods would appear. Because forum owners would like to preserve income generators.
Once again, we are talking in marketing fee for the provider. 1000$/year is peanuts in compare to other marketing sources. And if you build you entire business solely on let traffic... Well, what can be said.
@LeroyJ I'm kind of getting a feeling that you aren't actually a real communist after all.
Looking at the content of this forum recently I’m just surprised English is still its main language.
Heh, English is the one language where you can sound /write ultra broken - and your are still perfectly understood. And it is easy to learn it. Wonder if in next 200 years it will became single dominant language or at least as a 2nd...
You're making assumptions that historically has not been true. I wouldn't assume this to be true. But also you're welcome to your own opinion. I don't think anyone's arguing against you that one business shouldn't have LET as their primary source but the external factors that built the original case for 200 dollars isn't proving to be true.
Why JB should not charge 1000$ from providers? In few simple sentences.
$1000 dollars on a lowend niche forum / marketplace for a provider tag - one should simply understand that this would be an oxymoron (?). I mean the administration can set whatever fees but $1000 for a provider tag would
This forum is long gone from lowend. Now it is normal end. Providers increased price when there was electricity price excuse. Afaik only OVH reduced them.
@LeroyJ you're saying this perhaps from how you see it which is understandable and I'm saying from the perspective of how I see it (respectfully in a little bit of a different light) - I still see deals that are lowend like from time to time you may see a VPS for a little over $1 per month - that's low end (especially if it comes with an ipv4) - Price range example is between $12 and $18 dollars as an example - this is incredibly cheap even if it doesn't look that way - I do up the numbers and I haven't offered VPS because I can't see how I could do this without severely overselling especially with the price of IPv4.
Going deeper - have you seen many providers offering DDR4/5 RAM and NVMe storage? Let's assume they're being honest (just for a sec) - enterprise NVMes aren't all that cheap (you might refute this) - but overall the investment to get a machine up and running with adequate network isn't peanuts anymore (assuming most are coloing vs just buying a monthly server) - there's a lot of background costs and again why I haven't bit the bullet on offering VPS services. There's licensing, there's time to test, integrations that need to take place, agreements to be setup and sure they wouldn't offer a service hopefully if they weren't making profits but just from me doing some basic calcs - you haven't seen me jumping at the idea even though I've been thinking about it for 9 years or so.
Lowend market is near charity - I know we're not comparing apples for apples here but even our software but my profits can't even pay my gas bills - some big ones make it like Racknerd on the sheer amount of risk (I assume in the form of financing) but Racknerd is a high end company because it positioned itself there and is likely seeing great profits but no everyone can be the amazon's. No offense intended towards Racknerd by this comment - it is a compliment.
I don't think people understand here that this isn't the luxury mall you go to to buy Gucci. Many providers here though are ambitious enough to try but at great risk to themselves.
The one major thing that the lowend forums have is the market force of being cheap (at least for providers to get a sale) and exposure but exposure without a sale is what exactly?
Sorry for being so long, I'm just thinking out loud
Ou Risharde Risharde, you seems a good person. Take anote about few things:
Providers increased price
I would like to note that not everyone has done price increases. My Pricing for MyRootPW has been pretty constant. I wasn't required to do a inflation or energy cost based adjustments.
But then again i am likely what you consider "normal end"... ?
With regard to "providers increased price when there was electricity":
If you think that is/was an excuse, then consider that some data-centers in Europe had their power-fees almost increase by 3 to 4x. I am aware of one location where a kWH went from 0.19 EUR to 0.99 EUR (Price excl. VAT obviously).
Plus many contracts that providers have (connectivity, colocation space,...) also have clauses to adjust them for inflation - Typically based on some price-index/metric (ie: consumer price index).
This then often translates into service fee increases. Especially on Services where the "margins" are small....
You are correct that the energy rates are slowly decreasing in general when you look at the "energy markets". However...many data-centers typically only do price adjustments once or so per year. And even then, many are not "keen" to do a large decrease now, only to face a larger increase again in the near future.
The same may hold true for "providers" here on the forums. Why decrease your price now, only to get bad publicity if you are potentially forced to adjust back up in the near future?
With regard to many offers from various providers around here:
There have been a number of factors why you are seeing more expensive offers today. If we compare 2010 to today, 7 USD back then adjusted for inflation would be 10 usd today. (Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2010?amount=7 )
If you compare 2017 to today, you are looking at 7 usd becoming 9 usd.
At the same time, people also seem to expect more today, than before. (hardware, connectivity,...).
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3843300/#Comment_3843300
If you don't want to read it then it's not my problem. But for the sake of being "friendly".
At the end of the day, the website owner/staff isn't going to suffer from select community members (the newer ones and less experienced/familiar) get scammed. They still get paid. The buyers/community members are the ones who suffer. The staff are going to try but aren't really incentivized to minimize protection for you to the same extent that you want. So it's a partnership between you and the community. That means you, as the community member/buyer need to be educated and aware of some of these things and what are the common signs.
Because at the end of the day. You're the only person that really cares that your data is lost and that your money is gone. The forum staff isn't going to care as much as you want to and won't do the due diligence you want to. I can try and care or someone else on staff can try and care, but in reality it doesn't really impact them a lot if it's just one or a few people (as much as we want to say it's so). You can complain and bitch but increasing vendor fees isn't going to resolve this problem because it only makes the unit cost of scamming more expensive (but not prohibitive levels) while impacting other vendors for little-to-no gains. This is not the right solution for the problem. You have not aligned the incentives.
If you don't understand that then whatever. I tried. Maybe someone else who is nicer will spell it out for you.