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How can we improve LowEndBox?
We'd like to hear from you how we can improve LowEndBox! Please reply with your suggestions to this thread. Keep in mind:
- Non-constructive suggestions don't get us anywhere
- Things need to be achievable and realistic
After a bunch of suggestions have been made I'm going to collect them and come up with some sort of prioritized list. How exactly I'll pick the number one thing I'm going to focus on I haven't figured out yet, but that's of secondary importance at this point. We first need suggestions, from you, our visitors, in order to get started!!
So, what can we do to make LowEndBox more valuable to you? What can we make you do to visit it every day or every other day? What content would you like to see there?
Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond here :-)
Comments
More tutorials. Or at least a tutorial sub blog would be nice
Responsive site would be good as like me I'm sure alot of people use phones and tabs
LEB is the same ol' repeated offers and that got old pretty quick. I stopped browsing once I realized all of the interesting offers come from here.
Could you tell me which repeat offers you've seen this year, please? Because I've been focusing a lot on preventing repeat offers and highlighting new providers each month.
Several providers can attest to this as I've rejected their offers initially. In some cases improved offers were sent in.
@mpkossen sure. Only one offer is repeated. Here's a quick run down on one location, Chicago for example.
Everything has the same backbone. While I have nothing against CC; there is no diversity.
I do agree that CC appears to often, however it brings us back to the issue that this is because they are the main seed for cheap hardware. How about leaving the $7 limit on LET but increasing it on LEB to draw in more providers in different locations that do not feature CC all the time.
I know the hate will start about raising price however $10 could be a maximum, not a minimum. And it does not mean you need to buy if you care so much about never paying more than $7.
LET/LEB can't live in the $7 space forever. At least not for what they want/expect.
@Lee I agree CC has cheaper hardware, and LEB is transparent about it at least. That is just my reasoning for not browsing LEB ever anymore though.
I like your suggestion about opening up the limit. A lot of requests that occur on LET are of a higher budget too these days.
a truly quality provider of LET services will NOT be buying $20/m dedi. somehow encourage a "wholesale" market to LET providers
A true quality provider is one who has "already made it" in terms of service delivery. They can afford to offer a run of cheap plans on their high end hardware. It's about promotion, not making a living from the sales.
Unfortunately though many are buying a $20 server, well maybe a bit more, look at all the SYS offers appearing since the IP allocation was bumped up at OVH.
For many providers that would make offers here it is simply not worth their while at $7, but they would push something out cheaper than they normally would or you would ever see here if the price was reasonable.
My only suggestion is maybe, an updated design of LEB. Tbh, it hasn't changed much since its beginning isn't it?
I would recommend better communication with the providers that have submitted offers. Our offers have changed a few times since our original request for publication so we submitted the changes in a reply. We only submitted the change once but still never received a reply.
It would be nice to even hear a reply acknowledging receipt of the offer and possibly an ETA on when it would be published so if there are additional changes, we can inform you before that time. Sometimes it feels like we're being ignored and we don't want to bother you too much out of fear of never being published :-(
One thing to point out about the diversity, is that we have a pretty good portion of the LE* Chicago market, however that is not true in general.
Of the last 20 offers posted on LEB, we were the datacenter of only 1 offer. I think that is a MUCH higher level of diversity than say 10-12 months ago, when 1 out of 3 offers posted used ColoCrossing as the datacenter.
Maarten has really been focused on ensuring that new locations, international offers, and offers from hosting companies not working with ColoCrossing get lots of attention and I think the results of that effort is clear.
I think requiring a login to comment on threads in LEB would be a good idea. It'd weed out the anonymous detractors, but it'd also weed out the "anonymous" (read: employee of provider, we all know it happens) positive reviews.
Also a couple things not to air publicly.
Wut?
http://lowendbox.com/blog/stablebox-7month-1gb-windows-vps-in-three-us-locations-and-more/#comments - CC, April 6
http://lowendbox.com/blog/openvirtuals-16year-256mb-openvz-vps-and-more-in-4-us-locations/ - CC, April 4
With the USD getting stronger, the $7 limit can certainly hold out for the forseeable future, IMO. It actually puts the folks in Europe at a bit of an advantage, arguably. A year or so ago the 7 USD limit was around 5 Euro; now it's a little over 6.5 Euro, and climbing.
Honestly, I'd like it if they kept the 7 USD limit and put in place a resource ceiling for offers. Or changed the name, but grosslyovercommittedbox.com probably isn't as marketable. There's very little "low end" about 3GB (or more...) of RAM, except probably the performance.
shhh william, he is a compulsive lair. Hell remember when we all said CC owned LET.... yeah..
Ah, I see what you mean there. Sorry to nitpick, but that's not repeat offers, though, that's offers using the same DC. With repeat offers I mean featuring the same offer for the same provider as we did last time.
Just a note: we also had at least 5 offers in LA with QuadraNet over the past month. QuadraNet and CC are two very popular server providers for the LowEnd market and as much as I appreciate you wanting to change that, it's a big challenge in order to do so.
You suggestion has been taken, though, and will be added to the list :-) Thanks for taking the time to explain it!
We've indeed started listing DCs since some months ago and I've been asking people for those in tickets. I don't like to list locations without a DC anymore unless I have to.
I realize the DC may be a unique selling point for the more experienced LowEnders, which is why I understand your point about diversity.
That would mean either opening up WordPress accounts or finding a proper third-party solution. I am still looking for a way to get e-mail notifications back for comments and maybe make that a bit more interesting, so this would be something to look at along those lines.
It would prevent quite some SPAM, though.
@snape - you missed my point, it's about encouraging new providers. Many of whom won't deal at the $7 price, exhange rate and value have nothing to do with provider willingness to give offers.
Like I say, you don't like the higher prices offer you simply ignore it.
@Lee I think that you're missing the point. Encouraging new providers? Is there lack of hosting providers?
LEB wasn't made for providers to advertise business, but opposite for potential clients to find something SPECIFIC. And this specific is main thing which differentiate LEB from hundreds other wanna be hosting sites, forums, communities.
Do you REALLY need LEB to find new decent 20$/m host?
It work also other way around: If you like higher prices (ie. need host from other pricing segment) you simply go to site which isn't LOW END BOX.
I know that's endless discussion, but today there's more hosts which offer cheap hosting than ever before. If this thingy survived between 2008 - 2009, there's no reason that it wouldn't now considering price point.
@spirit, so why then is it all we hear is that LEB is "the same old companies and offers"?
Pointless discussion, where you all have closed minds.
Is that so? Because we don't share your opinion which you represent as absolute truth? You're smart guy, I know you are, but you never really understood LEB or if I may use word really liked. Maybe because you came later and never felt real spirit of this site and what runs it? (just guessing)
I pointed this out several times. Because historical reasons. After Chief overtaking (it actually started a bit before, but not so obvious) LEB started to depend from "exclusive offers" sent by host. If you don't send offer you have very little chance to be featured. And we all know who's sending offer all the time. LEB/LET residental hosts.
It's not about featuring lowend/budget hosts for a several years already, but about reposting coupons - direction I belive it's flawed (although I noticed some new or not so often featured names lately, which I welcome). If you publish offers from a popular hosts you buy a peace. Hosts don't complain. People don't complain. Everything seems fine. But this does not make LEB more interesting, because there's nothing worth to read or comment anymore. We know about those hosts everything. "Just give me damn coupon code."
edit.
To add something constructive regarding "How can we improve LowEndBox?"
My suggestion is to "feature" every name only once or twice in a year. Can we do that?
That's more than enough to INTRODUCE host to community. And there's enough lowend/budget hosts to still fill weeky featuring quota without reposting same names every 3rd month - I am pretty sure about this.
You are perfectly correct, 2/20. Whoops.
+1 for mobile friendly design.. I'm often accessing LEB using my tablet.
Bring back the top providers poll. It gave a good overview of LEB hosts.
Discontinue advertising or allowing offers from hosts that are obviously not fit for purpose, e.g. uptime well below 95%, highly questionable support, false claims etc.
I have already given this suggestion in the past..
LEB should have a semi advanced search where people should be able to search from all offers using filters like cores,ram,hard disk, location,price,etc. This will save people from having to scroll tens of pages to find what they want.
didn't we had a suggestion thread before that had alot of good suggestions that never got used? why did it got removed?
EDIT: im blind its here http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/11741/feedback-suggestions
why dont we just use that thread?
Can we start tagging IPV6 hosts with an ipv6 tag on lowendbox?
Noted and added to my list.
This is my list so far:
Maybe on the front page, you can enable selecting continents as sections along with countries as well. So that we can try looking every European or US based host no matter which country/state they're in.