New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Incero Price Hikes
Well, I was reading this WHT thread about Incero raising their prices and this kind of practice irritates me. Long story short, Incero has increased pricing for existing customers with existing services upwards of 70%.
I can understand a company raising prices for new orders, but existing services? 
Discussion @ WHT - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1355050
Comments
The following image should sum up the outcome quiet nicely:
Gordon is really bad at decision making.
I've read most of the thread on WHT. I'm glad I was never a customer over there. I have worked with a number of data centers and they have all been professional. This is the first time I see "the boss" of a data center answer questions directly on a forum in such an unprofessional manner. If PR is not his forte then someone else in his company should handle customer and public relations. Just my two cents as someone who read the comments.
A price hike is okay, treating your customers like they owe you something is not. Without customers a business dies. It makes absolutely no sense to put yourself and your staff through all that work, retire old crappy servers like X3440s (they are not even remotely competitive today), just to replace them with newer servers so that customers can swallow the price hike easier. Not to mention the extra work that customers have to do in order to migrate.
And lastly, in situations like these price hikes have to be announced ahead of time, way ahead of time. This isn't some VPS or Cloud operation where most of the customers are monthly and can migrate their data easily.
Bets of luck with this. Thank God there are plenty of data centers out there, so ultimately customers do have a choice.
'existing services' as in 'at renewal'. I feel sorry for those whose term had less than 30 days left, but everyone else...
-Price increases can happen at any time when the next billing cycle rolls around. If you want the lock in your price for a year, you pre pay for that year. Want to spend less? Getting it monthly is great, but your bill might get increased at any time.
-Existing customers should have more warning. Incero requires people to notify a cancellation 10 days in advance, right? Thus, invoices with servers due within 10 days should not have been changed, instead the price increase should have taken effect the next billing cycle.
-Slightly higher pricing from the get-go would have made this price increase less of a shock and it could have taken more time because there'd be more money as a buffer zone. A server that was sold as $99 could have been $109 the customer would still have bought it, and the company would have had a little bit more money to wait longer and come up with alternate money-saving solutions rather than almost doubling the price of the server.
-customers that paid a set up fee should have been guaranteed a certain monthly price for at least two years. if that monthly price went up, the set up fee should have been refunded
Nothing against Gordon or Incero but this was not a well executed price hike.
@shovenose didn't Incero cancel your server right after you paid it last year and kept the money? Maybe you can tell us how that turned out.
Nope, I got a full refund even though I would rather have had the server than the money.
About the whole Gordon/Incero thing:
I do not hate him.
He could have been a bit more patient with me but I take full responsibility for that situation and I was in the wrong.
The only thing to hate is myself in that situation.
@marcm, please stop trying to create drama and trolling in every thread. You have your own problems to take care of.
Trolling is when you try to create friction between other parties or instigate a flame war. I replied to your comments, so that's by no means trolling. No one made you comment on this particular thread or other threads. However when you comment you might get a reaction.
If I were you I really I wouldn't worry about other people's problems. As I see it you're trying to suck up to certain people, but brown-nosing will only get you so far in life.
You want trolling? I'll give you trolling. How's your DDoS the competitors campaign going?
Oh come on Rallias, you can't troll this year, because every troll comment you want to say, it will be retaliated with some teamviewer joke
I am far from a suck up. I don't want you to, or care if, you like me, and I certainly don't like you.
That is precisely what you are doing.
Maybe you should worry less about a forum and more about your customers.
Thus increasing the "meh" factor.
Hey, I don't judge you, believe me. But others have noticed this as well. Basically your own comments are evidence to the contrary.
I don't know you, and I don't care enough about you to not like you, or hate you, or anything stupid like that. But if you want to be emotionally invested and burn yourself up about this then I won't stop you. You can hate me all you want.
You can't call every comment that you don't like a "troll".
No need to reply because I won't talk to you anymore or mention you at all. I'll just keep away from you and you keep away from me. I hope that we understand each other.
Going back onto topic, doesn't @serverian have some servers on Incero? VPSDime at least. Will pricing be affected on Nodisto services?
@serverian is very professional, polite and a very nice "dude" so to speak. I'm sure that he will handle his business well and whatever issues may arise he will deal with them without much fuss.
And not to take a side, but shovenose has been too. Early on, when he was starting out, he offered me some resources for my nonprofit project. Although he never delivered in the end and ended up ignoring me by the end of our discussion, he was quite courteous about the whole thing.
Can we not end this debate about professionalism, idealism and who acts like what on this forum?
What kind of resources do you need?
My project is only recently beginning to take off. It was put on hold for a few years but I'm working on it again. At its simplest, I needed a reseller account. A few VPSes were a nice touch as well.
I just got a Crissic Solutions Reseller account and a INIZ VPS which should do me fine. I'm still open to more support but for the most part, I can manage.
I can help as well. I will PM you within the next few days after everything is back up to 100%.
No
Wow. that's a really generous offer! I appreciate it a lot.
RIP Incero you old prices will be missed
.
@ryanarp will this affect catalyst prices?
Good timing for our new Dallas site coming online at the Infomart
Our prices for dedicated servers and VPS are staying the same
Other than the 9.5% price increase on our overhead it really doesn't have any effect on us. We did a price increase almost 2 years ago that far exceeded this percentage that was closer to 25% to account for the higher priced quality servers and bandwidth that Incero provides. Some people will remember this price increase. However for us to provide the product that we desired for our clients it had to be done. Coming from FDC Denver in our early days it made sense that if we wanted to provide a quality product we couldn't sell at bottom of the barrel prices. So we have pretty much set ourselves in a position to grow with Incero of any other quality bandwidth provider with our business model. The most important thing to me is uptime and quality bandwidth and well Incero just can't be beat in my opinion. Since I have been a customer of Incero for almost 2 years now, I have seen them grow their network from 10gig to 80gig capacity. i don't think it is hidden knowledge that I work for Incero. So I won't hide that here. However this statement is from Catalyst Host as a Customer.
Ultimatehostings emailed last night saying they're going somewhere else because of this.
From that thread:
You'll find a lot of similar passive-aggressive posts from Gordon if you search around. He loves to hit customers with the "I'm sorry YOU couldn't do xxx".
Hi Marcm, any customer that is deciding to leave is being offered a free extension to their existing prepaid period. Nobody has to renew their services at the new prices.
Our sub $169 market represented less than 10% off our revenues but more than half of our costs. Most clients are responding favorably to the price increase, which for 90% of clients is only 9.5% for the first time in 6 years even though we've added multiple staff, an on-site datecenter office, 150gigs of bandwidth, and panel features in those six years.
It's been a great ride so far, and I'm excited about the future. Anyone facing issues simply needs to get in touch and we'll help them migrate, change their machine specs (combine servers into higher density machines with higher specs at lower costs), etc.
As for cancellation notices being required from clients, we did away with that sometime last year based on client feedback. Thanks everyone for the feedback, all feedback helps us improve.
Regards,
Gordon
@Incero
My comment was not meant by any means as a cheap shot. Or how the Italians say "no disrespect" ;-) Price hikes are common and necessary sometimes and it is a perfectly understandable practice.
What I said was based on some of the comments that I've read on WHT from customers that had their invoices at the very last minute. My understanding is that no notice was given to those customers, or that notice was given very late. I have been around the Internet for a very long time, and the number of companies that I've dealt with that had price increases always provided customers with adequate notice in advance so that customers could prepare and not be caught off guard. Not all of these businesses were necessarily involved in web hosting, however I would say that the basic idea is the same.
It's true that in most businesses the least profitable customers usually cost the most to provide for. This is why some businesses only deal with other businesses and not with individual customers directly, due to increased support costs.
Here is why it's a good idea to announce price increases ahead of time: because they get announced on forums by customers, then customers have time to think about the pros and cons of migrating, measure the quality of service they receive versus the competition, and by the time the new pricing goes into effect it's already been debated to death and it's not longer news, so it's blown over. Just my two cents :-)
By the way, I'm not sure why you thanked the comment above yours, but you might want to read all of it.