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We are no longer a Patron Provider.
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These changes on LowEndTalk are sad. Everyone will eventually leave and there will be no more forum, except RackNerd.
100$ to be a patreon provider is too much for the only small hosting company. Big players can easy pay 1000$
I miss the old LET
To be fair, for the value that companies can get from only $16 per month is massive. We are earning multiple thousands per month just from LET users. If you compare this to how much we'd have to pay on Google Adsense, it is a no-brainer. Of course it all depends on the products you're offering, perhaps a tiered approach so the smaller Shared Hosting outfits could also use it?
It makes sense for many, not so much for others. There are options, and plenty of loopholes in the host rep rules that will let you get exposure for free. Paying the fee is the easiest route, but if you do the work you can achieve similar without paying.
so moving forward:
$100 for sharedhosting offers
$150 for OpenVZ/LXC/LXD
$200 for KVM +$50 to include VZ
$300 for dedi
$400 for colo
stackable tiers if colo + sharedhosting = $500
great idea!
We would consider a tier approach but this has already been discussed and does not look like it will happen.
I was trying to understand your point of view here (from a business standpoint), but I simply cannot.
We are talking about a very small amount of money when it comes to being able to generate sales, and only pay a fixed amount of money.
Moreover, you are an Australian-based business, which means that you aren't that poor, either. Which means that you are, in a way, feeling entitled to either getting something for cheap, or not seeing its true value, because you didn't have to pay for it before.
Either way, I think it was a bad business decision, especially talking about it publicly.
It makes your hosting company look cheap, and like it's facing financial difficulties, even though the sum is, as I've said before, very small.
You are a business, and just because the business isn't doing that good at the moment doesn't mean you can't add in some of your cash. Unless, of course, you're treating it like some sort of a hobby, in which case I'd tell you to leave it to people who want to do business.
How you appear on the boards matters quite a lot, as @Clouvider proved in a different thread. Both of you proved something: customers shouldn't take you too seriously.
@TWC you misread the guy. All he is saying is is not profitable for his business. That's how business owners run things. You have to analyze if is profitable... competing for the bottom is not the way to be successful.
Also I think they use a high end cloud provider (Linode) for their servers. Which means higher costs. Not everyone uses outdated hardware.
It's not a personal account, it's his company's account.
If all were right with this world, all non-personal accounts would pay some sort of a fee to be a part of the community (any). If you can't pay a board membership (or some small fee), then you're probably not making any money.
If you're not making any money, or if you think it's not worth it, then you shouldn't be complaining about the membership fees because it makes you look cheap, and you're gonna lose customers later on should they come across a thread like this.
P.S. I offered to pay in order to be able to advertise my blog in the signature, but the owner said that it was fine. I can't say that I agree with him, but it's his site, so his rules.
@TWC what's not expensive for you might be expensive for him. We are all in different levels, financially and mentally.
I think is ok to announce that he is no longer a paid member, basically letting the users and customers know that he's still active in business.. but no longer advertising here.
His argument was that is not working out for him from a ROI perspective. Maybe he has other channels that works better. Remember this is let, here you either sell at loss strategically as advertising strategy or sell dirt cheap for volume.
Analyze this, would you rather have 40 customers that pay 1 /mo each or 5 customers that pay 8/mo each ? Yeah in this community you will not find those that pay $8 mo for shared hosting.
Yeah, but he's not going to stop posting, and he's keeping the company name as his username. He still wants the sales. He just doesn't want to pay for them. IMHO.
I have to note that I'm not in the hosting field (as a business), but I use services from a lot of hosting companies, and one thing that you have to agree with, whether you like it or not is that your business isn't doing good if you HAVE to be making a decision like that in the first place.
If I were looking for another hosting company, I know that this thread would put me off.
And, yeah; of course that you wouldn't... it's unsustainable in most cases, and put simply, it would end up crippling and ultimately destroying your business (e.g. @cociu), but all I meant to say is that it looks bad from a PR perspective, but I will note that there are ways to make it work on the low-end market. You just have to account for every little thing. Difficult, but possible.
A business is a business, and everything is judged a 100x worse, so you have to make sure that you're not harming your brand.
Bingo.
Bottom line is LET and LEB cost plenty to run, maintain and grow. We ask for a very small contribution from those profiting most from the platform (the providers).
Each month the total count of Patron Providers has increased, and I am immensely grateful for the support. So clearly most companies see a ton of value from their $100 per six month investment.
This is where we were coming from, we see the benefit of linode and what it serves our customers, we believe its a premium service, and in order to grow we need to make business decisions we have posted a crazy deals elsewhere that have seen higher return then LET and we think this just comes down to LET is mainly VPS and we don't do that at the moment.
We are only in australia and plan to keep it that way, if you can share some stats on australian visitors to your site would be helpful
Of course which company does not want sales.. We have been member of this forum for a long time, we enjoy this community...however a majority of the providers on here offer VPS our business does not. but like i said we have had success on other forums and word of mouth. If you want a deal we can customize one for you, we are good like that. Our latest deal we posted was $10USD per year and we still had people only wanting to pay $5USD a year, sometimes you just have to laugh.
You should pay then, that simple.
I mean, look... just because some people wanted it for less doesn't mean that you should ever be condescending, you can simply explain to them why it's not doable, and give them an explanation also as to why it would be dangerous to go with a hosting company that would in fact sell it for such a low amount that they won't be able to get any type of a ROI unless they're overselling, or scamming... or both.
You can even offer them an option on a lower-end colo'd server which you could use for "starter" sites, which would be the cheapest possible packages, and you can then switch them over to the Linode option, where they could enjoy the latest hardware, premium routing, etc.
It doesn't mean that you can't make it work... it just means that you have to be smart about it like @Francisco, for example.
In any case; you are on an international forum, and your account is the name of your company, and we have no way of knowing how many customers you gained from LET.
That's me being realistic... maybe it was a few customers, maybe it was a dozen... it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you're actively advertising it, and in your response to @jbiloh, you note that you're only interested in Australian customers. If that's the case, then you shouldn't be using LET, or rather, then you should be using it as yourself, personally, and not as your company.
We are for sure offering amazing deals to these customers and nothing is ever condescending.
We stay on this forum as this is not a breakup with LET @jbiloh and the rest of the moderators and our company have not had a falling out, Jon is a top bloke and we have had many conversations about this. As mentioned perhaps from time to time we will advertise on LEB.
Glad to be a top bloke!
Hope to see you submit an offer to LowEndBox, it's free.
As for traffic from Asia/Oceania -- way more than you might think. A full 34% of LET's traffic comes from that region.
ofcourse LET is like 80% vps, 15% shared, 5% dedis market. (my assumption looking at the offers and memebers' responses towards it)
had it been you selling vps, there could be much more reasons to stay as patron provider here.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I got the impresssion that he's just found that the LET market isn't generating sufficient revenue to justify the cost of the patron provider tag. That seems fair.
If say LET brings in 250 sales of the $10 per year package, and costs him $200 for the tag, on that kind of package he might only make $1 profit and even though that would be $50 profit, personally I'd say it's not worth it for such a meager profit because at any point you could have fewer sales or increased costs and it could quickly shift to a loss.
If you're pushing a higher-profit package like $10 a month or pushing 1000s or 10000s a year, then the cost of the tag is insignificant.
But that's not forum policy (I mean it'd be against the rules for him to even create an alt personal account and use that) and nobody else is being forced to do this. There are plenty of providers here who only pop out of the woodwork in response to requests, and nobody complains about them.
waiting for LowEndBox forum
Business is business.
Thanks for the necro
Recall what we said about necroposting
Thread closed