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Comments
Do something about the 13.6%.
I was delighted to see our concentration of female users was so high.
Be great to increase our female audience if possible.
That's higher than the typical ratio in a CS course at uni, or in typical industry professions - e.g. sysadmin, developer, etc.
This is a male dominated industry. There's not much an individual site can do about that.
Dafuq? That's clearly not half eaten.
Sounds like it's accurate +/-13.5%.There's really only two (not percent) females on LET.
Google could actually use LET to determine fake female accounts by comparing to LET.
I did not notice this conversation. It seems LET became WHT. Not even the ColoCrossing management was this greedy. The low-end passion is gone from LET, out the window; only the useless talk remains now... for profits.
i feel
inspirational comment will be gone ....
Guess the ColoCrossing lease was up for renewal...
Absolutely not. I have known at least 3 females on LET: @haodo @phanh from our Sales team, and Katie @ Hetzner, maybe Karen @ BuyVM too?
We have paid the Provider Tag Fee, and currently have an ads on LET(not quite effective) as I'm not against the fact that a person/company will need to have profits for spending his time and investment.
Yeah that part of the plan doesn't make any sense unless you're trying to genuinely grow the community and you're targeting the types of people you want to bring here.
No that part makes sense to me. The better LEB is the more it will recruit people to LET and improve the community.
Jon I largely agree with what you're saying here - but there should be a greater benefit. For example a paid provider tag should in my view come with a link to a company profile page on LEB in the "provider directory". That is the key thing missing at the moment, and that would provide some real value to everyone provider and punter alike. "Provider" doesn't give people much information other than that the company meets the minimum requirements under LET terms for the tag, and everyone's website is completely different with information disorganised (often difficult to find etc). What would help users is a standardised provider profile with the name of the company, the name of their LET representatives (or just a link back to their LET profile), links to their TOS and AUP documents and a clear summary of regular services offered and their regular prices AND what taxes they charge.
Again that stuff needs to be standardised in any directory because companies do their own thing on their websites. In the US it's common to advertises prices pre-sales tax, in Australia it isn't unless your services are intended as professional (business to business). If you standardise it and make it easy to read, understand, and compare it benefits everyone.
You are doing a good job of explaining your thought process etc, but I personally think you should put in the changes I'm recommending with the provider pages on LEB ahead of charging providers, because that would actually add real value. E.g.:
It's incredibly simple to write a small javascript function that would put in those links (assuming that Vanilla doesn't have the ability to natively do it or an extension since that is quite a niece use of user tags) and would take up no extra screen space and simply re-use existing screen real-estate, but right now there's nothing to link to!
Did CC ever truly leave this place? @jbiloh, whilst having bought the two LE* platforms out of his own pocket, does seem to have a certain propensity towards CC-based hosts... xD
There are a few times per year where we will strategically invest in ad spend to capture audiences during peak sale events. This modest investment will benefit all hosting companies on the LowEndTalk platform.
Thank you for your generous support. It is sincerely appreciated.
I agree and like your suggestion very much. I've put on my calendar for Monday and Tuesday to work on something like this for both LowEndTalk and LowEndBox.
If you have any other suggestions or wish to expand on this idea specifically please send me a PM. I'm happy to hear.
Thanks for taking the time to share the concept.
ColoCrossing and its brands have not been featured on LowEndBox or LowEndTalk, AFAIK, since I acquired LEB and LET in January 2020.
The highly concentrated exposure that ColoCrossing based hosts received on LowEndBox ended upon my acquisition of LEB and LET in January 2020.
I do not believe there is a single hosting company that can claim they've not been able to gain exposure on LEB or LET assuming their submissions follow our guidelines.
In fact, I know that @raindog308 and I have spent dozens of hours inviting hosting companies to take advantage of all of the free perks our platform offers.
Here is just one recent example: https://lowendbox.com/blog/providers-grow-your-business-in-2022-partner-with-lowendbox-for-free-advertising/
So Racknerd isn't a ColoCrossing based host then?
High concentration does not equal restricting any ColoCrossing host from participating from being featured on LowEndBox. Before I acquired LEB and LET in January 2020 a vast majority of featured offers were based on ColoCrossing infrastructure. This is absolutely no longer the case.
We've added another Host Rep benefit to the official guidelines today.
New benefit:
Inclusion in the periodic Host Rep Roundup (HR3)
Thanks to @Not_Oles for running with this idea and putting in the work to make it happen.
Still happening
you just favour Racknerd now, don't even see much of Virmach now or is that because they are slowly removing their CC locations?
You are really reaching here. One larger hosting provider being featured on LowEndBox that uses ColoCrossing for some of their infrastructure is not equivalent to the concentration (where a high percentage of offers published were from providers hosting exclusively at ColoCrossing) as seen in years prior to 2020.
So that means all hosts, including Virmach as you mentioned specifically, are welcome on both LEB and LET.
The benefits available from the LEB and LET platform are available to all. Both @raindog308 and I spend dozens of hours convincing hosts to put in the little work to take advantage of those benefits. Some do, most don't. Here are just a few recent efforts in that regard:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/providers-grow-your-business-in-2022-partner-with-lowendbox-for-free-advertising/
https://lowendbox.com/blog/providers-partner-with-lowendbox-3/
https://lowendbox.com/blog/providers-partner-with-lowendbox-2/
https://lowendbox.com/blog/providers-partner-with-lowendbox/
https://lowendbox.com/blog/advertise-with-lowendbox-and-lowendtalk-2/
https://lowendbox.com/blog/community-deals-standing-discounts-and-deals-from-leb-for-cheap-vpn-cheap-vps-cheap-everything/
Much like sanctions, it'll be some time before the LET community feels the affects of this decision. Why the owner feels he needs to charge top shelf prices for rail liquor is hard to understand.
show me the $$$
$how u$ the $erver$.
Maybe change that title. Sounds weird and folksy. Isn’t actually a round up of host reps. No-one visiting for the first time LEB knows what a host rep is so it needs explanation. Overall, gash.
Still waiting on a further price increase before I consider it. $200/yr is too cheap in my opinion.
The end is nigh.
Hi @Nekki!
Thanks for helpful and constructive criticisms!
You might be right about changing the title because it sounds weird and folksy. What should the title be?
I will add a bit of explanation for new folks so that they get a clue about what a Host Rep is and what the difference is between a Host Rep Tag and a Provider Tag.
You might be interested to hear that a topic under discussion is a free 6 month Provider Tag for Host Reps who advertise at least once per month for six months in the HR3. I think it fair to say that this concept has been received favorably, and that it likely will be implemented formally in the near future.
Personally, I want to do everything I can to assist new providers. I sincerely hope and trust that the combination of
a free LET Host Rep Tag,
free weekly advertising with a ton of page views on LEB, and
followed by six months free initial Provider Tag here on LET
will go a long way toward mitigating any adverse effects on new providers of the recent Provider Tag fee addition.
@Nekki The reward for great work is more work!
You are invited to collaborate with me on an article for Low End Box. We can write about pretty much whatever you want. 
@stevewatson301 same invitation for you.
I thank both of you guys yet again for your very helpful feedback! 💖
Best wishes and kindest regards,
Tom 🙏
It’s pretty simple really.
He saw a lot of people making money by selling servers on here, and wanted to stop that unless every simple host doing so paid him some of that cash.
He’s tried to do things like inventing discounts, inventing different payment frequencies, and pretended like he’s offering something to those that don’t by letting them post crap on LEB or in some giant thread whenever he allows it. But the reason it feels dirty - is he’s essentially asking people to pay him $200/yr to post threads on a vanilla board… where he also expects them to post discounts at a loss…. To s,community of penny pinchers… and where he has said they can offset the cost by posting more advertisement threads.
There are only two outcomes.
New hosts don’t buy in, only some do, and LET becomes the same 3 hosts posting over and over yelling doubled bandwidth. Which is what the outcome looks like now.
Or he’s hoping hundreds of hosts pay him every month, and flood LET with paid ad threads. Fortunately this turned into a running joke and a lot of us have left except to come back and shame this practice periodically. Which is the best anti-spam scenario.
Meanwhile he’s planning to use all that money not on LET, but LEB, which has become a running joke to the community. It’s where hosts go to deadpool and spam, and I don’t think a single person in the community trusts a single post on that website.
Make no mistake - he allowed the community to grow LET so he could inject a payment between those thread posts, hoping users have become dedicated to LET for offers and hoping hosts are dependant on LET for sales. If it feels predatory, it is, most people would call it a form of digital extortion. And the reason some hosts are refusing isn’t just the poor ROI, and not just because they can’t afford it, but because of the moronic way it was rolled out - continues to roll out, and the ethical hole of some guy trying to maximize his profit off what is essentially a coupon board for servers.
He’s not providing the servers, the support, or any real marketing. He feels he should be making $200/yr off people selling heavy services at $5/year without really doing anything to earn it. It’s not a question of value but ethics.
Thanks to @Not_Oles for coming up with another idea to help small providers:
Earning a Free Provider Tag
Part of our mission at LowEndBox and LowEndTalk is to enable the success of small upstart hosting companies. As part of that objective we've rolled out Host Rep Roundup (HR3). We are giving out, free for six months, two Provider Tags to the first two hosting companies that take part in HR3 for six months in a row. Inquire within the Host Rep Roundup thread.
Not a question I could answer. It needs to be something consistent with the naming strategy of all the feature articles, and something that's designed to capture the attention of your target demographic, whilst not using any LET/LEB 'slang' that may prove confusing to new visitors.
OK, I want to write an article about the lack of DRM in online pornography.
If you're going to persist with the terrible name, at least get it right - it's the Host Rep Roundup Rodeo.
I believe that @Not_Oles is considering a tweak to the name. I am not sure.