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Course we could just stick to the definition of "low end", sure there are some $7 providers of 2GB VPSes and we've heard great things about them, but course at the end of the day they tend to monopolize LEB it seems. And last time I saw an ad for a 1GB KVM, people kind of jumped down their throat as not being possible (I mean hell, if someone can sell a 2GB Ovz VPS for $7... why couldn't that be possible), yet it seems people are more willing to believe a 1GB+ KVM/XEN VPS at $10, oddly the way skepticism seems to work (which in some part was probably fueled by the people who wanted to keep their close ties to people who run LEB :P)
Just seems like the people who get aggressive mainly worry about competition, when the end-users can make that choice.
@jarland @jcaleb @Taz @averell and @rm_ (thanks for insulting me by the way, you're a real charmer)
I am talking about raising the price point. With that I would expect an increase in resources and overall quality of service as well. $10/mo is a nice round number and everyone from consumers to providers would benefit from this.
It always evens itself out, that's what I hope people would remember. If it's unsustainable, it won't last. If it's truly creative genius, if pisses off everyone else and forces them to work to keep their customers. That is precisely the beauty of a well executed free market.
Well then it wouldn't be low end. In the earlier days of LEB it was more about doing as much as you could with as little resource as possible. The price limit seems to me to have been placed there to purposely exclude and limit. Personally, I see WHT as a perfect place to go to for anything else. It's shifted to a bit more interest in how much can you provide for how little, but I'm a fan of a website maintaining it's purpose, especially when alternatives exist.
@marcm wht has no price limit. Why not compete there with 10$ better service and stop worrying about leb.
@jarland low-end is subjective, for example $10 for a VPS seems pretty low to someone who may be shopping around for VPSes that average an easy $35 to $100 a month.
@Taz :P Maybe because WHT has a different kind of customer base? :P
Well then target that for 10$. Let has always been about lowest.
I like $7 limit, it has been proven that its possible to provide good service and support at this price level.
Also, people also use LEB use it for hobby projects or study purposes. Hence they have budget constraint.
@jcaleb ... or they're just cheap. ... yea I think that's 90% of it. :P
As I have said once, you don't need to compete with 5$ 2gb. Compete with 7$ 512mb xen. Makes more sense.
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/hello-world/
Someone register slightlyhigherendbox.com
Yes, thats part of it. I'm one of those cheap
Just for now. But when I hit bigtime... I'll change
+1
@Taz - I don't know why all of a sudden you are getting so defensive about this price point and repeat the same thing over and over again? I got your point the first 3 times you've told me, and I respect and understand what you have said. This is just an idea, and I doubt it will happen, but it doesn't mean that we can't discuss it.
I don't believe WHT works anymore. This is a really good community, but times are changing, hardware is evolving and like @jcaleb said, customers expect more resources for the same amount of money year after year. The cost of hardware isn't an issue (yet), but it will be once worldwide resources will shrink even more. The price of energy will only go up, and so will the cost of living. So my idea has a more complex reasoning behind it than just what you see on the surface. Plus I don't like this fight among providers who are trying to race to the bottom. It is ridiculous. Why not take away some of the business from the big monopolies instead?
That was in 2008, 4 years and 10 months ago, almost 5 years since then.
Then don't. I don't. I'm getting plenty of business. Honestly, $7/m from every client would have me swimming in cash. I'm not sacrificing quality. I don't see the problem.
Right, it's already having the effect you're desiring here. As costs lower, providing inside the given bracket becomes easier. One need not adjust the bracket when the market itself adjusts just fine.
@marcm, really hoping that 2013 reshapes the VPS industry. Competing on price point alone is a trainwreck in slow motion. Price as differentiator is only slightly better than competing purely on the UnixBench'marks. Benchies mean something, but show me them when the node is populated and let's see what that load really is.
Bundling, partnerships and value add. Folks need to look at BuyVM and what they do from the value add. MySQL offload, that save tons of headaches I bet. Common clog point and problem creator.
Folks are looking at this LEB market as consumer focused. Unsure @jarland. Many of us that buy VPS'es are more like wholesalers
We don't buy one, we buy many, dozens even.
Even the way deals are structured often is much like B2B level sales. Custom quotes for raw resources are fairly common. I started buying off the specials menu, but found the offers typically didn't fit my needs (too small on drive space).
The space between $0 and $7 is not very significant. Easy to lose money on a transaction of that size.
What dictates the VPS market pricing I think is the downward pressure of prices lowering for small dedicated servers like Atoms. Take OVH for example:
The Atom wins in many ways as resource is dedicated and the drive is massive. But it loses on price to LEB VPS (apple to oranges comparison somewhat).
@marcm is it about quality of service? I don't know the math as I have no experience. Hope others can comment if $7 vs $10 can be a big difference, service wise
Honestly I wouldn't mind the LEB maximum price being raised to $10/month... as long as there are still $5/$7 plans available, even if they are usually oversold.
Not everyone is fighting for providing more resources for the same price. Established providers here haven't changed their prices in a long long time, and still selling well. But it's really hard for newcomers to compete by not giving out ridiculous offers.
And $15/year plans. I love those
Works for every other industry. That's precisely how markets regulate themselves to fair pricing in perfect conditions, by challenging people to compete.
0.06 ...about 80% full currently.
@jcaleb :P well big time or not, I've seen plenty of customers who go on the cheap, can actually afford three times that price, then bitch when they don't get $100 quality in regards to performance, support, management etc. (or the fun one is to claim they're losing so many dollars an hour the site is down... which gains next to no sympathy when they paid less than $10 on the VPS that they could have insured more).
Rant aside, I still stick with my stance that 'lowend' is subjective, if your primary customer base are indians and chinese, what reflects 'lowend' may differ than if you cater more to north america or europe. Also an uneven number like 7 mainly seems to apply to the US... where as the rest of the world has already switched to 10-base :P so seems like it'd make more sense. (ok not a real argument, but I tried).
Also I love the argument of "well why not just offer 512MB Xen"... versus 2GB openvz? just how smart do you think most of your customers are? hehe, it's a number game really. You try telling someone that 1GB Xen-PV or KVM is the same amount of ram as a 2GB OpenVz (without vSwap, CentOS 5.x such as used by ChicagoVPS), and they'll just spin their head with a LoLWut?
Just seems like the people who make the argument against the change are the ones that would benefit the most from it not taking place.
So who is going to offer me a $5, $7 or even $15 2GB VPS with 1TB of disk?
Someone who got ahold of some amazing second hand hardware for next to nothing, or someone who is going to dead pool. Doesn't mean no one should try to find a way to do it.
@jcaleb business has its cost. New comer wants to get in ? They can offer something unique? Maybe sell at loss and count those as advertising cost to gain new clients and hope they will upgrade to next plan or give you more visibility? Mind you, some host pays 100+$/client on affiliate commission alone and those Client only pays 5$/mo. Forget the additional AdSense ads and other costs.
Well, one thing that has me concerned is the availability of IPv4 addressing space. We are a couple of years away from having a properly functioning worldwide IPv6 infrastructure. The bottom line in regards to this: I'd rather see more higher spec VPS servers offered for a little more than tons of 128MB (or smaller).
The other thing is that I believe that at a $10 price point better specifications can make it every and each VPS offering. For example at around $10 a month (considering the coupons that @Nick_A from RamNode had or is currently offering) this community would get 1GB OpenVZ VPS servers running on SSD.
These are the specs from RamNode:
1024MB RAM
1024MB VSwap
4 CPU Cores
20GB SSD space
1Gbps Port
3000GB Bandwidth
1 IPv4 Address
16 IPv6 Addresses
Weekly Remote Backups
TUN/TAP
@jarland said that the market adjusts and so on, but a plateau effect always happens when the costs won't fall beyond a certain threshold. I hope that you guys can see my point.
Those are some nice specs right thur!
The market is changing constantly, it never settles forever. Also with IPv4 and IPv6 issues on the table, we have no idea what is about to happen in 2013. Datacenters compete too, and new ones are popping up all the time.