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I should start my own thread with that.
All I am saying is it is a valid business idea, and to some extent FreshRoastedHosting has achived some degree of success. Last time I checked, LET is meant for discussion and sharing ideas.
If you are not happy with my post, go ahead and don't read it, I don't think there is any point for me to argue with you over this,
Was the business plan for the hosting company you're going to start aimed at low-end or high-end?
Ok, but what's the idea? To raise prices? To sell higher end boxes? That to me seems an odd idea on LET. I'd rather see discussions on how to make do with less. For instance I applaud the recent loweendspirit.com 3 euro/year plan which has no unique IP4 address, minimal everything and charging for support/having community support. You'd think "here's how to sell cheap" is a more appropriate discussion than "you don't have to sell cheap". I guess vendors might like that, but don't get upset when customers crash your party and start drinking all the booze.
I'd seriously ask the question: why are VPS so expensive?
If it's hardware, lets oversell it. It' not a dirty word.
If it's support, lets get rid of it and make iot a paid add on. A forum works wonders for most people.
If it's chargebacks and fraud, lets discuss how to reduce or eliminate it maybe by reducing options or increasing id requirements.
Why is moving higher a better idea than these? Serious question versus your idea.
Both, I have plans costing as little as 4 bucks a month to as much as 13 (for now).
I'd seriously ask the question: why are VPS so expensive?
If it's hardware, lets oversell it. It' not a dirty word.
If it's support, lets get rid of it and make iot a paid add on. A forum works wonders for most people.
If it's chargebacks and fraud, lets discuss how to reduce or eliminate it maybe by reducing options or increasing id requirements.
Why is moving higher a better idea than these? Serious question versus your idea.
@nutjob My view is that I would see as many VPS providers staying afloat as possible so that there is a reasonable degree of competition within the LEB market, and pushing for 7 bucks for 100GB RAM is not going to make anyone stay afloat for now. All I have presented here is something for providers to consider, if you do not like that idea, there are a million other posts you can read.
Well that's what we have, isn't it? You want cheap VPS, you come hear. You want expensive VPS with support, you go to linode or knownhost, etc.
Sorry, not true. "Most people" use cPanel and are busy running their business/forum/game server/whatever and don't want to take the time to become Linux sysadmins.
If I don't like your idea I'm going to criticize your idea, not go read something else. If you don't like that then don't post your ideas in a public forum.
I really don't care if vendors go broke or not. It's a free market and if you can't make a buck then you shouldn't be in it. It's not the customers fault if a vendor can't make it. Raising prices won't save a vendor. FRH is probably succeeding due to marketing and/or support if they just reselling. Or something - what is it?
The bottom line is businesses succeed because they give customers what they want. What is it that customers want and how can you give it to them? Pretty sure higher prices isn't one of them.
And people pay for CPanel, right? That's my point. If it lowers prices, proper LEBs should come with ZERO support except for issues out of their control like node down, DOS, etc, and then only notifications, one way support messages. If you want more, pay for it. Current LEBs let you use as much support as you want for free, apparently.
Do you really think VPSes are "so expensive"? I think they're quite cheap.
What would you think would be cheap pricing?
Well, we've only had one sale of our new VPS plans. So now I doubled RAM, disk, bandwidth, increased port speeds, and quadrupled vSwap, in an effort to lose slightly less money on the $200+ server.
People want 4GB offers for $7 and don't seem to care about the infrastructure behind it, rather than a 1GB for $7 that isn't oversold, and is on Hardware RAID10 with BBU at a real datacenter, not some shitty software RAID with lousy desktop grade drives, a lousy network, and slow CPUs
@shovenose no. A lot of people don't do $7/2GB VPS, but a business isn't just about posting an offer and sales will come. Not that easy unfortunately.
I really don't think that is your problem.
People do want 1GB for $7, just from a host they trust to be capable of being a host.
@mpkossen you have not had a VPS on our new infrastructure. It's blazing fast, ultra reliable, and properly secured. Try out ShoveHost VPS, you will NOT be disappointed!
It's not your infrastructure I don't trust. It's you.
If you want feedback on why I don't trust you, let me know and I'll send it via PM.
@mpkossen any feedback is appreciated.
Spot on matey.
The 2 cliches that are most applicable to you are:
1. patience is a virtue
2. don't expect instant gratification
Being 2+ years into VPS market as an active buyer I find this VERY true.
Of all the bargain priced providers, majority have random and spotty service at best. There is a group beyond that who keeps things online (uptime) but has pitiful CPU, slowwwww disk, etc.
Probably 20% of the providers in bargain bin worth considering. Many of those have been stung this year by prolonged outages, failures, etc.
I'd buy a dedicated server any day over similarly priced VPS. Problem is, can't buy a $7 dedicated server. Well not currently, but you will soon (at least at $10).
I continue to buy VPS accounts for two real reasons:
1. Testing networks and eyeballing them for a period of time (too expensive to make bad decisions about dedicated/colo and find problematic network).
The industry needs more providers that have active monitoring of their servers and are proactive about resolving issues. Recommend everyone buying any service to use monitoring service to monitor their servers. You will be surprised how many blips and issues really happen with many providers.
Hmm ...
I think the 3 euro/year plans are pretty good. But it's more of a buyer's posture: I will always think they're too expensive. There should be downward pressure on all technology, and there very much is.
I also think all VPS vendors are crap. I'm not saying this from personal experience, although @pubcrawler above makes my point. I'm saying this from the point of view that there is no way any one of them can give you acceptable performance, which for me is 100% uptime. So I buy multiple VPSs (and keep on buying them) from multiple vendors to build in redundancies. I have the luxury of doing this because I'm not running HTTP servers, but you could also do that with some work I guess. It means that Im only interested in price since I don't have to think too much about their performance. There is also business failure risk but that is mitigated by price. I try to keep a small percentage of my VPSs with any one vendor.
Well, I disagree with @nutjob. "All VPS Vendors are crap" what leads you to say that?
@jarland CatalystHost is not crap
@Francisco BuyVM is not crap
@shovenose ShoveHost is not crap
@Francisco BuyVM is not crap
@shovenose ShoveHost is not crap
This is just priceless
People want 4GB offers for $7 and don't seem to care about the infrastructure behind it, rather than a 1GB for $7 that isn't oversold, and is on Hardware RAID10 with BBU at a real datacenter, not some shitty software RAID with lousy desktop grade drives, a lousy network, and slow CPUs
A vendor's jaundiced and self-serving view. I think you should look to Google's example, who use consumer grade technology for servers.
But more to the point the above is pretty much marketing drivel (no offense). Let's say having "premium" hardware mean you have half the failures (that is VERY VERY generous). That means that hardware failures drop from say 1% to 0.5%, but in reality all other causes of failure are much higher (power problems, human error, etc, etc) so all that expensive gear gives you exactly nothing, except some marketing drivel. It may give you 10% better performance but at 50% greater price.
Google's experience is instructive. When they set up their data centers they experienced (from memory) something like 1% hardware failures but something like 3% failures overall due to all factors, mostly software bugs.
Did you read what I actually wrote, like the next two sentences?
Good thread.
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression they used commodity servers but still enterprise-grade, just home-designed/managed.
@Nick_A I agree.
This is only for drives, fact that Google is all about storage they just test HDDs and get the best one regardless of being enterprise or consumer.
And yes, they also do home design, their racks look terrible imo, but if it works...
What I'm saying is that you said VPS providers are crap and everything less than 100% uptime is not up to your expectations?
How is a good VPS any worse in reliability than a dedicated server?
That's fine and all but I hope you understand that what you're actually saying is that the internet is crap, the entire world's electrical infrastructure is crap, and your expectations belong on the same shelf as your unicorn and imaginary friend.
We all want 100% uptime, but achieving it is nothing more than a dice roll no matter how much you've done to get there. When you've finally figured out how to control the weather with 100% certainty, you'll just get trampled by a pack of deer. Maybe when the entire earth exists purely on some sort of infallible computer life support system in which every variable is calculated and executed with 0 chance of unforeseen outcome then you'll have 100% uptime and not just a SLA. A 100% uptime promise is best effort combined with a gamble and a promise to pay you for the percentage lost, nothing more.