New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
When I first read this, this didn't sit quite right with me, and a couple of hours later I still feel the same. I know you're not a native speaker, and so maybe this is just a poor choice of word and you don't feel the same nuance, but "chore" seems really off here.
I get that maintenance work is annoying and not that much fun, but it's all part and parcel of the job, and part of your obligations resulting from agreeing to offer the service. Most of this maintenance work also doesn't directly affect the customer, it affects you as a business owner - so migration from old machines to newer more efficient ones, you do because it saves you money in the long run - it's worth paying to upgrade a server if it saves you on electricity and you can break even in e.g. 2 years. But all of that is irrelevant to the customer, who just wants the service they bought and nothing else.
But the comment "updating all those idle resources becomes a chore" feels like you believe the customer is wasting your time by having all these resources they don't need, causing you to have to migrate them elsewhere, but in reality the opposite is true. Having them idle resources gives you a steady revenue stream for a service that can literally be put anywhere because the customer is barely using any resources. An upgrade for you isn't necessarily an upgrade to them, it's just continuation of service.
There's also the implication that a customer with "all those idle resources" is somehow less important than any other customer. Sure, it might be a VPS they've forgotten all about (I've done it more than once), or it could be something really important. For example, it might be an emergency shell account used to ssh somewhere on a whitelisted IP that only gets used if their primary jumphost fails, I have a VPS that only runs DNS but it's important that it keeps running and I don't care if it's overspecified for its job - all that's important to me is that the DNS it's serving remains available. So what that it has 20GB NVMe and 4GB RAM, and I'm using less than 512MB RAM, a few GB disk and less than 1% CPU?
As a provider, you shouldn't look down on these instances as being pointless, you should just be thankful that they're not using many TB/m of network and that you can put lots on a single host because they're not using many resources.
Why you need update e5? This is storage vps, I not expecting very powerful vps, while I need just upload my backup. Maybe some clients need it, but not for the most, I believe. If you positioning host_c as data storage provider, I believe powerful of the server is not matter. For me, have not difference is it works on 1 vcpu of E5 or Epyc or something else. And I totally sure the support of old system is cheaper than last gen, only if capacity of new one more than old one, but lots of hosters still provide E5 plans. I believe you use external storage systems and connect it to hosts over Infinity Blade or something like that. Am I wrong?
PS I believe $$ clients don't like the history when their plan price will change because the hoster wants update their hardware. They need stable, they plan for years to the future.
PPS I believe the $57 for 5Tb still very reasonable price, but the tendency is a little bit confused me.
You might want to re-read what he said as I believe you've misread what he said/meant. The "chore" is customer side not provider.
Oh yeah good point, I hadn't even considered that interpretation. Reading it that way makes sense. Sorry @host_c !
A lot of people—not just our customers—buy services they don’t actively use. When prices increase, updating all those idle resources becomes a chore, and understandably, people get frustrated. But if you’ve bought 30 VPSs and only use a handful, that’s not on the host—that’s on the buyer. Cancel what you don’t need and move on.
In the above context, chore = effort/burden
updating all those idle resources becomes a burden/effort, and understandably.......
okay that's a tough situation, do you happen to know the owner over there? or who is your rep?
I think your chatbot broke.
no chatbot here Zed all original content
most of the hosting companies that I have done business with, I always knew the owners and could get things resolved pretty quickly.
This is not how you stay afloat in LET market.
You want, I would even say you need people to idle those servers. If they start using them all they will explode those servers. Overload, explode, dicks goes byebye.
People like @FAT32 are your best clients - he probably have no idea how many servers he have, all of them idling, using almost 0 resources.
Oh I think he knows how many he has
Ya but how many am I using is another question
Never said nothing about usage, that is confidential.
I enjoyed the journey of the read, but I was just excited about a 386dx.
Lol
However, i sent out some reqests to some friends.
I am waiting to see what dinosaurs they have left on inventory.
Me dinosaur you say?
Naa, was not referring to you.
It seems that the oldest we found is some 5XXXX series, ( Gen5 HP for example ) not old enough.
So I did put up a to-do list stuff, the second I will find some Pentium 1,2 or some AMD K6/ Cytrix 6X86 stuff, I will Dremel it onto a case and put it up to an auction
To clarify, when I was referred to the "lifetime" products I have with a few different providers in my response to someone else in this thread, I was talking about true lifetime products which have a once-off large payment and no recurring fee at all. Those are ideal for long term backups as there's no possibility of a renewal being missed.
I wouldn't call a product that doesn't have random price hikes "lifetime". That's just a normal product, and what I consider an industry standard, with any provider who does increases for existing services being an outlier.
Out of the last ~50 providers I've had servers with, the only one I can think of that did price increases for existing services was Hetzner, and I got rid of my Hetzner servers when they did that.
Myself and many others expect recurring charges to be predictable. I won't even consider an offer that has no recurring discount, or one with limited discounts only for the first X renewals.
I intend to keep most of the services I get for the foreseeable future. I have a few dedicated servers that I got 13+ years ago, including even a 4th gen i7 from OVH which I'm paying $87/mo for even though they sell the same hardware for $15 now (since I need to retain the primary IP and OVH refuses to adjust the price of an existing service).
I suggest you clearly state time limit terms for the recurring price of your services when offering deals in future, so that customers aren't surprised when you do price hikes.
This entire thread is just fucking depressing. @host_c already provides dirt cheap services, and is generally willing to work with people. They refunded the $6, and gave the same offer as everyone else got: stay on legacy hardware til the end, or pay a bit more and migrate. It's still a stupid good deal. The amount of "you should state this or put this in your terms or do this or eat the cost because i want to save $5" is just... seriously disheartening.
take it with a grain of salt:
I also wish for GOV and Politics and markets to provide me stable same prices for the next decade so I can do the same towards my customers. deal?
Just a question here:
Does your Phone ISP company do price index once a year?
Does your Barber do a price adjustment 2-3 times a year?
Does the price of gas change in your country 1 / moth?
should I go on or you got my point. So basically you want a fixed price in a dynamic environment for the next 5 years? did I got your point? - and this is not related to whatever is going on in this tread, as a general rule I asked. ???
Nevertheless, this is all about phasing out hardware and going to something newer. You can stay on the old one until it gets decommissioned or move forward, your choice not my, and again folks, ~1.5 Years heads up, man, lol, I will pull the 90 day card on the next ones.
Don't get me wrong, I get that price adjustments are sometimes unavoidable in order to keep your services sustainable, especially when there are considerable external cost increases in the country.
Your ~1.5 years grace period for the price hike is also more than reasonable.
My only point was that, in my experience, it's very rare to see increases of existing virtual servers, especially in the low end market. Providers usually only increase the price of newly ordered services, rewarding loyal customers and covering the costs of new gen hardware with a combination of new orders and power efficiency savings of the new hardware.
Apparently I'm one of those, as I got a message out of the blue today asking if I want to upgrade to Scale 2. When I checked both of my services, I found they are already running on Intel Gold CPUs, so I was confused about what needs to be upgraded.
I (and I assume others in my situation) didn't receive any of your emails about retirement of the E5 CPU family or the price increase required to keep our servers. So I was completely in the dark on this.
You might want to find out who those people are and make sure they are sent the right emails to avoid similar surprises.
I have to say @hosthatch is an excellent example of this. I've got multiple services with them that have been migrated over the years from slower to faster CPUs (Intel E5 to AMD Epyc) and better storage infrastructure (RAID 50/60 to RAID 10), and I'm still paying the same price. I fully expected they would ask for extra money to migrate to their new storage servers, but they didn't.
I don't expect every provider can do this, but HostHatch deserves particular praise in my opinion.
+1
Fun fact: So did Contabo and highly likely a few others as well. The reason, I guess, isn't sheer benevolence but rather a mix of factors, presumably some benevolence being one of them, but mainly some others, more pragmatical ones like e.g. electrical power cost. I think that many still underestimate the size of that cost factor.
That said, I of course agree and am pleased as well when a provider not only doesn't rise the price of a product but actually also increases its performance.
But still, I've yet to see another storage provider who offers very high reliability, very good quality, really decent support at ridiculously low prices like @host_c does. And if such a provider occasionally adapts their prices to a significantly changed context I have no problem with that, especially when also better performance comes with the price change.
@host_c
I totally get the idea of raising prices when upgrading hardware — that’s understandable. Better hardware costs more, and users can decide whether to stick around or move on. That’s just how things work.
What confused me (and a few others) is that we got a message saying we should upgrade our servers to Scale Gen 2. But when I checked, my server was already running on Intel Xeon Gold CPUs. So I figured this upgrade and the upcoming E5 phase-out wouldn’t apply to me — or at least not so soon. I thought the upgrade I paid for would last for a while.
But after I opened a ticket just to ask about it, my CPU upgrade was suddenly canceled, the $6 refunded, and my server downgraded.
That was honestly disappointing.
It felt like the upgrade I paid for was just thrown out, mainly to push people into more expensive plans. And it makes me wonder — if that can happen, what’s stopping the same thing from happening to one of your current flash deals or promos later?
I’m not saying cheap promos should last forever. But when someone pays for a feature or upgrade, I think it’s fair to expect it to stay valid for a reasonable amount of time.
Let’s say there are two possible scenarios here, even if the outcome looks the same in the end:
a. Started on E5-V4 → paid to upgrade to Gen 1 → later got a free upgrade to Gen 2 during maintenance → now E5-V4 is being phased out → refund issued → CPU upgrade canceled → downgraded back to E5-V4.
b. Started on E5-V4 → paid to upgrade to Gen 1 → later Gen 1 was removed due to issues → refund issued → downgraded back to E5-V4 → now E5-V4 is also being phased out.
Both lead to the same place, sure — but in case (a), it really feels like the old upgrade was canceled just to push people into more expensive plans.
After the maintenance upgrade to Gen 2, most of us thought it was a nice, generous gesture — and even helped promote how great it was.
So it was really disappointing to later be told that it was only temporary all along.
My vps is already upgraded to Xeon Gold 6240 but I still get an email saying that my services on E5-v4 will be discontinued and I have to upgrade to a Xeon Scalable, even though it's not on an E5-v4.
In a nutshell, I think you're just making all this up as you go along. It would be better to just increase prices flat out instead of going through the upgrade shenanigans.
Same here. I think they’ll downgrade to E5 eventually and then discontinue. Mine is also Xeon Gold 6248. Most likely a case of their automation failing to create the server in the correct node as explained by them before because I never paid the $6 for an upgrade.
My vps was upgraded probably a few months after it was created, and I specifically created a ticket to downgrade the vps back to an E5 because the upgrade was supposed to be voluntary and I never approved the upgrade but they did it anyway.
In any case, forced upgrade is why I abandoned Apple with their money-grabbing bullshit and this is just another example of that business model. I'll wait for Host-D because I'm done with Host-C.
You paid for holding that space. You didn't do anything with that, that's your problem.
If I am renting something, whether I use it or not, I will have to pay.
It is as simple as that.
Yes, I thought I made it clear that I specifically paid for holding it at the early adopter price, not expecting a random price increase for the existing service.
I've done the same thing countless times with dozens of different providers, taking advantage of rare launch/BF deals, and have no problem paying for an idling service until I am ready to start using it.
The gamble is usually whether the provider will continue to exist long term and not deadpool after a while, but this is the first time I've had one decide to increase the price of a recurring discount given to early adopters.