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Why are people so fond of annual plans here?
rustelekom
Member, Patron Provider
in General
Such plans are ordered in order to get a discount. We can agree with this, but it would be wise to first test the provider's services for several months and then decide whether to purchase the service for a year.
But if people had chosen this option, we would not have seen such a huge number of requests for annual plans. However, what is the point and purpose of those who purchase annual plans without any checks? Do they have too much money?
Comments
Imagine paying monthly for your 300+ idlers
imagine paying $0.58 every month with paypal transaction fees being half of that
$7 thx!
So that provider like you can profit more
We do not like yearly plans. Until now, we have not offered any discounts for yearly plans. Why is that? We have reasons, but I will post them later.
My immediate thought when I read that last sentence:
I'm buying a yearly for 12-15$ and a few months in I can feel like I've vetted your services. I've found some really excellent providers this way as well as some fucking horrid ones.
Few months in I've decided how useful you are to me and mine and add you to the list of providers I use for "real" services and recommendations, and even in the absolute worst case I can probably find some use for the rest of the annual on the cheap test box so I'm not losing out (much).
Spending that 12-15$ on a single month isn't as useful a test because everyone's on their best behavior (well probably) on the first date.
it's a pain for me to even manage these fucking vms let alone billing
, even big cloud providers give good discounts based on contracts and longer billing periods)
my vm with you is paid yearly, even though you offer no discounts (which gets me
@zed got it quite right, I usually do the same thing. I've found insane & amazing providers this way. Usually my VMs are idling for months before they're even setup. I just monitor port 22 and grab uptime data. If the VM is useless crap, I usually don't even bother ticketing, just cancel it and run relays or other stuff on it. Don't have the time to deal with providers having issues every 2 weeks.
this doesn't mean i go around giving free money, rather that it's worth for me to waste a bit more of $ to find those gold mine providers than paying a well known provider for their expensive services (plus I also win redundancy if I have many cheap VMs)
Imagine paying $0.99 (after any and all fees) monthly from a credit card that offers small balance waiver.
300 credit cards = 300 free idlers.
I think there are lots of reasons for that actually.
I prefer annual just for simplicity, I pay once and then it just works for a while. I have lots of biannual and even triannual with providers that allow it, and I love it.
If it's a provider I don't trust, I use a generated one-time cc number. It's easy enough to do once a year, but I would never do it once a month.
From a providers point of view I can imagine transaction fees being a big part of it.
Also, abusive users naturally prefer short term contracts since they know that they will probably be kicked out pretty soon anyway. A spammer knows that he will not last a year so he would probably avoid paying for a year, it's kind of an abuse filter in itself.
I don't think this has anything to do with people having to much money. I'll admit that money is not really an issue for me but I still hunt for bargains and the really good ones are usually annual.
Hi.
Any deals here?
@SmokyHosts @DediRock
Please share any not sold out so we have good examples to study in the thread. <$10/yr pls
discounts and another bill I don't have to remember to pay
So I can lock in the best currency conversion rate and hope that I saved a bit and no need to worry about monthly payments anymore.
Since everyone has spoken about the positives, and I agree with all those views, and that is the reason even we offer yearly plans, let me share the counter arguments...
There are calculated risks taken by the customer in opting for a yearly plan as well as for a provider, providing a yearly plan.
For the customer
1. Agree that the customer has their money locked up for year, while taking a calculated risk that the host turns out to be good. But the customer is getting benefitted by the discounts, to an extent that even if 1 out of 3 hosts turn out to be good, yet they are better off than paying monthly
2. The customer doesn't have to bother about paying on time, monthly, while also risking that they might forget that they ever had a yearly deal and the subscription got auto-renewed!
For the provider
1. Customer aquisition comes at a cost. You either spend money on platforms like Google Adsense and in turn get higher margin customers or pass on the benefit to the customer by offering the similar amount of discount that matches you spends on platforms like Google Adsense and gain a customer here at LET. End of day, the customer aquisition cost would average out to be similar.
2. Payment gateways charge a lot of fees, which 99% of the times are absorbed by the provider. In such cases, the provider rather absorb a one time fee in a year rather than 12 times the fees in a year
3. The provider also is risking committing to a longer period of time to a customer. What if the customer turns out to be an abuser. They'll have to tolerate the abuser for the entire term! Yet its a risk worth taking, although within limits
End of day what matters to a business is sustainability. And what matters to a customer is quality of service. If 1 in 3 hosts turns out to be good and yet total cost turns out to be the same, neither the customer nor the provider is loosing anything!
For example, you can checkout our SmokyHosts | Stock clearance sale recap | Free giveaways | $7/yr VPS campaign, where we offer $7/year deals, but you'd pay the same amount on a monthly basis if you go to our website and order a similar plan
i even offer providers to pay 2 years in advance, if i know/trust them.
reason: i have to do bookkeeping and i hate bookkeeping.
Sometimes 1 years plans are bad.
Both parties have to commit to 1 year of service, but often providers on here oversell or have maintenance issues or even just rug pull their service. There may be better deals that come along but you’re stuck with your current provider.
Pay-and-forget-for-a-year approach.
It can also be that if paying with card, there are fees for international payments, so you have to pay them every month, if paying monthly.
Don't know about that, you can simply kick the abuser out and don't have to give him anything back when you have well written terms. I've seen such cleaning of abusers many times, everyone was happy.
I've yet to see the cheap deals $7 or $12 to cost the same monthly or yearly. Also too often you can't upgrade from monthly plan to cheaper-per-month yearly payment. It's forum like this that can offer people good feedback whose services are worth buying long term, which ones are kinda even bet and which will probably result in summerhosting.
Imagine being reminded monthly for services you barely remember signing up for.
I would go bankrupt, building a mesh network paying like 3$/m each.
These 7$/y deals, open new opportunities, endless opportunities.
Hm, some posts have opened a new perspective for me on yearly plans. However, I see that many respondents talk about a lot of idle servers (or rarely used ones). Can anyone tell me what the reason is for ordering a few or even hundreds of idle servers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding
Hm, so that is one of the results of living in a consumer society? That's interesting. I know a lot of people in Russia who are also affected by this problem, but here they aren't so virtualized and mostly buy unwanted buildings, rooms, jewelry, high-end equipment, and so on. It's also a good way to diversify their financial assets.
Don't forget FOMO
Oh, we call this behavior shopogolism
BTW. This year I didn't see a queue to buy an iPhone 17 in Moscow. People don't like the aluminium case, I guess.
Mainly because of discount and that it's annoying to login to pay 2 dollars per month or whatever.
I’m looking for a 2 core, 4GB RAM VPS with 60GB NVME for $20 decennially.
hell for my long-term projects I use 3+ year billing cycles where possible. if the reputation is good enough and the discount is nice, why not? @jar and @hosthatch have more than proven that this is fully reasonable