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The only reason people are so pissed is because even after the price increases, T4VPS is still the cheapest game in town, so they know they don't have any real substitutes, and just have to swallow the change.
T4VPS did the right thing. Sustainability above all else. Screw your unique snowflake sensibilities.
Cheap storage is one of my long-term obsessions so I fairly carefully track what's available where. Time4vps got in a bad spot (their old offer was too good to be true/ unsustainable, and maybe had more takers than they planned for) and they had to get out of it slightly ungracefully.
I sympathize and I think they did the best thing under the circumstances (yank the discount from new plans while keeping it in force for existing ones), but it got that way from having made unwise decisions earlier.
Maybe they could have kept it going if they had pitched it as a promo and limited it to 4TB per person or something, but they ended up landing some very large customers and were "victims of their success" as online.net likes to put it.
If anyone cares, a big Hetzner dedi (SX291) with RAID6 will run you about 3.2 euro/TB/month on server rental, plus there's a setup fee. But it's a quite powerful server with HW raid etc. If you own the hardware and use a cheap-ass Backblaze-type setup, you can probably get below the 2 euro/TB/month that Time4vps was charging.
People who haven't ordered from a provider are not 'Customers'.
Get the contract term and pricing you require and you are protected by the contract.
I knew the prices were a loss-leader experiment, but from a long established company trying to grow in a competitive sector.
So I took a calculated risk and ordered for 2years.
If they don't want me to renew at the end of 2yrs at same price, I'll use whatever is the cheapest price/tb on that future date from same/another provider.
I have a 2 year 512GB plan with them so I'm a customer. It really doesn't matter whether I'm a customer though, since I can be annoyed with any provider over anything I want, whether I'm a customer or not. I'm annoyed with Apple for eliminating the 3.5mm audio jack in the Iphone 7 even though I've never owned any model of Iphone and have never really considered buying one. The annoyance is that other manufacturers are now doing the same thing. They couldn't be the ones who started it because they don't have Apple's market clout, but now they can be followers. So Apple's move will screw up MY future phone options including non-Apple options. And so on and so forth. I think such annoyance is perfectly legitimate.
I like this idea.
however, if I remember the wable drama correctly, it didn't stop 'abusers' (if you still trust Incero PR) from signing up for multiple Wable powerboost promocodes.
Another amazing thread about "price increase".
First, let's address few questions with this post:
https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/1955715/#Comment_1955715
Now, let's make a few notes in bold:
This discount removal impact only new orders. Existing ones does not have any price change at all;
Discount for standard VPS packages still apply for yearly and biennially billing cycles. Hurry up and make your order now;
Our default pricing schema does not change;
Good luck finding one even at Time4VPS new prices. they are still very competitive.
A company that is there for ~14 years (are owned by UAB Interneto Vizija in Lithuania), with owned offices, a lot of employes and good reputation, is unlikely going to deadpool because they just... lowered the discount in their offers!
You should look deadpools in hosting "companies" of one man show, when his incredibly low prices either bring him debts or the small profits he might have does not give him any real motive to continue to give 15 hours of his life daily to fulfill his obligations to his "company".
@willie Where did you see price increase for existing boxes? I didn't. For new orders? Yes, they have every right to remove the offer and go back to their original prices, as stated in their website, or increase them.
After all, this is a fair policy. Giving great discounts to create a big base for a new product, fame and reputation and then, return to a more profit price from some point after. What is wrong with this tactic?
P.S. I should mention also that they own their datacenter.
I hadn't realized that. I thought he was dead stupid but now it makes sense to me why he squeaks like this - he is butt hurt like mad.
Amen.
Who's shaking?
People who didn't get the yearly deal when it was open for 18+ months.
I didn't. Someone else said that this could or did happen, and that it was perfectly ok if it did. I said that old boxes had stayed the same price (per t4v's posts in the other thread) but (edited) new ones had gone up. I saw that as a bit ungraceful but understandable under the circumstances, while it would have been out-of-step with observed industry practices and more likely to cause customer dissatisfaction if they also had raised prices on existing boxes.
Then there was a big discussion where deadbeef and one or two others said that customer dissatisfaction over such an increase on existing plans would be unjustified because gas stations and grocery stores raise their prices all the time, and me saying VPS are not gas stations and people set their expectations according to what they see other vendors doing in the actual industry. Raising prices on existing VPS seems to be almost unheard of: the one example anyone found was a 3% across-the-board Leaseweb increase, 3% being barely enough to notice. (Despite that, someone in the announcement thread said Leaseweb management should have been fired over it).
Of course. I understand the circumstances that led to the removal and if I had been part of their decisionmaking process I would have supported it. But I see it as a step-back from a plan that was announced or at least implied earlier, i.e. a recognition that the company was not able to carry out its intentions.
If that is what happened, then your description of it as a "tactic" says exactly what is wrong. A tactic is a scheme through which one outmaneuvers an opponent, not a good thing to see if you prefer to do business with people you consider to be allies or partners rather than opponents. If I find someone I'm dealing with engages in any sort of "tactic", that lowers my trust in them enough to possibly rethink the relationship, though I might stay in it anyway (at heightened vigilance) if the incentives are good enough. I know this is LET and we all like to pinch nickels, but these days I prefer to use only the most reputable (usually not cheapest) LET providers so I can work from an attitude of trust rather than vigilance.
Rather than a "tactic" I prefer to view what T4V did as an unwished-for but necessary strategic retreat. Not a perfect outcome, but the best choice in a bad situation. I had hoped they could make it work at 2€/TB and I saw that as a positive development in the industry. I still think it is doable with a different approach.
Dream on. I told you I have a discounted 512GB plan with them, i.e. 1€ per month, and that I had been thinking I'd upgrade to 1TB sometime, i.e. an additional 1€/month with the discount, or now it would be 2€/month without it. I'm not going to butthurt over an extra 1€/month, in fact I spend more than that (each) on multiple idle VPS that I haven't gotten around to cancelling. And if I really personally cared about the discount, they've said something about a possible Christmas promo so I'd just wait and see what appears. Plus there was that poster with the 2TB discounted plan for sale that I could have bought, but I decided I didn't need it.
Obviously the financial impact would be more noticeable if I was going to put 100TB with them, but if I had that much data I'd want it in colo so that I'd own the hard drives (that's my long-planned next step after Hetzner). Or if you just want the cheapest possible storage and don't need a VPS, Amazon Cloud Storage is a flat $60/year and people report having 100+TB there without problems (that probably won't last forever, but it's there now).
Also the entire discussion we had was about a hypothetical action (raising prices of existing plans instead of just new ones), that T4V did not take, because they have more sense than you do. Doing that would frankly signal that they didn't have the operating funds to keep existing disks spinning, which screams incoming deadpool and would scare the pants off people. So they know better, and you are the one who is dead stupid.
P.S. You can also get a Hetzner SX291 server on a month to month basis if you want a lot of storage. How would you like it if you rented one and after 6 months or a year they raised the price on you? Keep in mind that you paid a 250 euro setup fee to get that server. Yeah you can say, be paranoid and make sure the contract spells out the renewal terms. I prefer to deal with vendors who I can trust to not pull such stunts.