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Comments
It is a good idea and has been on the list.
They were genuine 3 day promotions to selective 5 old threads, not to all of them!
The idea behind the 14-day rule is that a provider may start a new offer thread every 14 days, at which point the previous offer thread is no longer promoted by the provider
The idea is not that a provider keeps promoting n previous offer threads for the foreseeable future
Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying.
Just would have been better to know the reason, rather than closing without any reason. Hope some day Vanilla makes it mandatory to add a reason for closing a thread
Can we ban providers if the YABS is against geneva convention?
Any GB6 below 500 should be a bannable offensive if not resolved within 14 days.
Please discuss about a rule for free services that invites new users to register here and disappear after getting a RAM or Bandwidth upgrade. This i think, should be limited to 1 month and stopped after. All free services have a hook somewhere.
Not speaking about community VPS providing services by sponsored dedis. But VPS with limit, claimed to be unlimited. Same for VPN.
I would like to propose a rule change for VPS offers. This could apply to other offers too!
Current: Only post offers that are less than or equal to $10/month, or equivalent recurring.
Suggested change: You must include 1 offer that is less than or equal to $10/month if you offer post.
This would allow providers to show more options to people who want more resources. This same rule could apply for DS/VDS etc too.
There are users here who are looking for more resources. This form is closing out your some of your market reach as a whole by being this strict.
Many companies including Oplink.net offer great deals on higher end resources vps and other services.
Thanks,
Ryan
@JackH @FAT32
Disagreed. This is a low-end community. Such change as the one you proposed can seriously be abused by providers offering just 1 or maybe 5 stock of VPS at $10/month (in order to obey your rule), then load their post with lots of high-end available offers. Such a behaviour will defeat the whole point of a low-end community. In the end there is nobody to seriously check the stock of providers.
By limiting it to just $10/month offers or bellow, providers can stick to the very definition of low-end. As such, I respect your opinion, but can't possibly agree with it due to unknown potential abuse in interpretation.
Simple report the post if that happens.
Lowend can be lower for other things too.
What's to stop someone from offering a <10/mo offer and having 1-5 in stock now? Nothing!
All they do is post a link to the website with other services/plans.
Thanks
Ryan
That what you say happens allready.
Its the problem, that it shouldnt be common, if you post an offer for example: A vps for 15 with coupon first month and afterwards its 40.
With such behaviour you'd have to extend the limit, but that is set to 10.
Can't you already doing this just by providing a link? "And check our website .. for larger offers". Shit some of the offer threads don't even list offers, just a link.
Plenty of good deals under 50/mo out there for huge storage > @zed said:
Everyone does this now. Just seems silly not to be able to list other plans if you have 1 plan in stock at the LET rules. This only helps the forum grow and provide more options to people looking while still following the rules
Then why have rules in the first place if providers want to bypass rules, and we know they want to bypass rules, and we want them to know we allow them to bypass rules using a specific loophole... why? A provider can simply have no plan in stock and just say it sold fast - an argument to advertise higher plans using offer threads.
As per your argument, we might as well cancel the rules and let everyone advertise as they wish. We might as well change the name of the board while at it, because it might turn into a spam-fest of offers which will no longer be considered low-end anyway. See my point? If we create the rules, and we disconsider our own rules by creating loopholes, then why have the rules in the first place? For a facade of SEO? (I guess you could be right considering the ServerVerify fiasco.)
O wait
who follows rules here? Its rules for thee, not for me.
I wouldn't think managing offer posts where inventory is sold out would be a problem I guess. I do get your point. A rule could be added to only let hosts who have been here for 1-2yrs do it.
The great ServerVerify benchmarks based on location? yah nuts.. A company ranks low if your based out of the USA, it favors EU servers/hosts based only on network rating.
I would care only 5y+. But guessing that would cost extra.
I want one time discounts for terms shorter than a year to be banned
tank you
Tank you as well!
Agreed.
The sub-$10 offers often end up being more about marketing and popcorn than about real, usable services.
There are providers here who can genuinely offer serious VPS/VDS or other services that some users actually need, but they’re constrained by this rule. Posting things like “hey, this other promo code also applies to higher-tier services on our site” doesn’t really work either—it drags the thread into a very subjective gray area and skirts the rules instead of addressing the core issue.
One possible compromise could be allowing higher-priced offers for providers that have been around for a while—say 3, 4, or 5+ years. That alone would significantly reduce hit-and-run behavior while still keeping the spirit of the forum intact.
That’s also a fair point. However, in practice, sub-$10 services tend to attract an amount of abuse that’s on a completely different level. I think most providers here would agree that abuse rates on <$10/month services are significantly higher than on $15–$20/month ones.
Let’s be honest: $10 today does not buy what it did in 2020. If it does somewhere, please send me a pin—I’ll move there myself.
Another option could be limiting higher-than-$10 promotional posts to, say, once every three months per provider. I doubt it’s impossible to track or enforce something like that.
I fully understand and respect that offering ultra-cheap services is part of the forum’s identity. That said, this isn’t really about today’s prices changing—it’s about the overall cost and value of everything going up.
Providers that aim to offer ultra-low-cost VPS services will inevitably oversell. There’s no realistic way around it. A 12-core / 24-thread Ryzen, for example, will end up shared between 100+ customers, which is exactly why we see “fair share CPU” clauses in so many ToS documents. That’s not an accident—it’s a necessity at those price points.
You simply cannot expect to sell a $2,500 server, plus roughly $150/month in recurring costs, and make it sustainable with 50 x $5 VPS instances on it. The math just doesn’t work. This isn’t pessimism—it’s basic arithmetic. Am I really the only one here saying this out loud?
If the CPUs aren’t massively oversold, then the alternative is usually legacy hardware—DDR3 platforms, older CPUs, and aging storage. In some cases, it’s even worse: RAID 5 built on large-capacity drives, a setup that has been considered risky for well over a decade.
With modern disks (6 TB+), RAID 5 rebuilds can take days, especially under active I/O. During that rebuild window, the probability of encountering a second disk failure is uncomfortably high, turning what should be a recoverable situation into full data loss. This isn’t theory—it’s a well-documented operational risk.
Either way, the outcome is the same: degraded performance, instability, or both. And in the end, it’s the forum users who pay the price through poor service quality rather than transparent trade-offs.
I do think the rules could benefit from some level of indexing and modernization. At the same time, user expectations may also need a small reset to better reflect today’s realities.
@host_c Create an example with cost, specs and discuss it with the other providers. Maybe admins will get a hunt to change something.
There is no fixed specification or cost to propose here, as the intent is not to define a new product tier, but to allow higher limits for more established providers.
As a general guideline, providers that have been active on the forum and operating for more than four years could be allowed to post offers of up to USD 20-25 /month, limited to once every three months.
As previously mentioned, this is not about removing the forum’s spirit. The goal is to raise the overall quality of offers and, by extension, reduce aggressive overselling. ( or whatever is in the mix to hand out a 3000 USD server at 5 USD / MO )
I would also be fine with paying a higher annual LET provider fee in exchange for access to this option.
However, I would not lower the provider age requirement — four years or more is a reasonable baseline, and a higher fee would further reinforce that.
This approach would:
Offer higher-quality products to LET users — and yes, many users here already pay for such services elsewhere.
Filter out hit-and-run providers through the 4-year minimum and higher fee.
Improve the overall signal-to-noise ratio on the forum. ( quality shit show
)
If a provider were to abuse this, the community would quickly call it out with benchmarks, tests, and real-world feedback — that part already works well here.
As things stand now, abuse is often easier with dedicated servers at much higher price points. With VPS offers, the usual issue is extreme oversubscription/oversell/low uptime- the usual stuff, but because the prices are low, it often slips by, so the agony goes on.
Cheers!
EDIT:
I agree that the $10 VPS limit comes from an era when many providers were (and some still are) cramming 200 customers onto a single Xeon LGA 771 system with 32 GB of RAM. However, over the past ~5 years, I no longer see a real benefit in keeping this rule.
I also don’t see a strong justification for higher price limits on dedicated servers. For example, 2-3x 1U R640 LFF servers are not more expensive than a single R740xd2 with 24 LFF bays populated with 24×20 TB HDDs. So why should a dedicated server have a higher sales limit than a VPS running on significantly more expensive hardware?
This comparison is purely meant to underline the point. I’m using Dell hardware as a reference simply because I’m familiar with the real-world pricing and operating costs.
@host_c The price should rise with the specs, otherwise the vps market has no value to dedicated server. In example ovh could ruin some regions, where the vps would cost the same, knowing the hardware is potentionally different. I would tend to reduce tag prices for 5+ years and completely remove for 10+ years, cause they get more credited by reputation so its the forum with higher user counts.
In modern times right now, you could oversell everything now, it can come drastically with raised hardware prices.
@ascicode
I might not have fully understood your point, so please correct me if I’m off — I’m replying in good faith here.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that if VPS prices go up, they start competing with dedicated servers. On that point, I don’t fully agree.
For example, 4 vCores on a Ryzen 9 5900X are not comparable to a dedicated server running a Xeon D with DDR3, 8 cores / 16 threads. Performance-wise, the VPS wins by a large margin. So price parity alone doesn’t automatically mean product parity.
Regarding the idea that users would ask “Why buy a dedi if a VPS costs the same?” — one obvious reason is operational responsibility. With a VPS, you don’t deal with failed drives, NVMe replacements, hardware diagnostics, or reinstalls caused by hardware issues.
Now, I agree this becomes subjective depending on how dedicated servers are sold, and I don’t want to turn this into a dedi vs VPS debate. But generally speaking, dedicated servers are chosen when users want full control or need to do more complex things.
With the performance of modern CPUs today, many workloads no longer require a dedi. That said, this still depends entirely on user preference. I also tend to think that someone ordering a dedicated server usually knows better what they want — VPS is often a click → deploy → works scenario, while dedis are mostly manual and require a more “power-user” mindset.
Traditionally, the market has looked like this:
Cheap → VPS
Expensive → Dedicated
But this model doesn’t always hold anymore. We have cases today where very expensive hardware is sold as VPS. As an example, I’m sure some could explain how a 256-thread EPYC system — with a CPU alone costing ~$25,000 — ends up being treated as “cheap VPS infrastructure.”
At the same time, I don’t think it’s fair to sell pre-DDR4 systems at high prices either — but ultimately, everyone is free to price their services as they see fit.
My point is simply this: not all VPS services are cheap anymore, and not all providers oversell 24 vCores to 100+ users. The current $10 VPS limit penalizes providers who are trying to do things properly on modern hardware.
As for OVH and similar players — they can do whatever they want. They have extremely deep pockets. Smaller providers like us can’t compete with that — at least not for the next decade 🙂
What we can do is offer niche products with impressive performance, something they usually don’t focus on. Unfortunately, the $10 limit effectively kills that possibility. And regardless of how good your website is (in our case, we don’t even have one yet — just a very basic WHMCS page), growth becomes painfully slow. Allowing higher VPS limits could actually help the forum by attracting better offers and more serious providers.
Now, if what you meant was this:
Providers with 5+ years → higher or relaxed limits
Providers with 10+ years → no price cap
Then I’m completely fine with that — actually, I like that idea even more.
It would naturally separate things:
Established providers wouldn’t race on low-end pricing with newcomers — they’ve already been there, done that.
New providers wouldn’t try to compete with long-standing ones, because there’s no race to begin with.
Everyone focuses on their own segment and portfolio.
On the overselling topic — there’s no perfect formula, I agree. But when pricing is realistic, at some point overselling stops making sense, even from a business perspective. - There are some who value their image more then a few more $$ gained in overselling, at least I like to think so.
So, did I understand your point correctly?
Sure, but in High End Offerz category, separate from normal offers.
Having a separate category allows easier moderation, because readers and moderators don’t have to keep track of when the provider last posted an high end offer.
No price ceiling, go wild, but double bandwidth bumping and raffles disallowed.
Minimum spec for high end offers:
true, would not go for yearly here, monthly + quarter should be enough.
on VPS/VDS, I would not let any setup fees, as wtf, the setup is done by a module the second you pay the invoice. Ah reminds me, no automation, no posting, I highly doubt that a provider in the 5'th year is doing manual install. Also, no pre-sale of any kind, we are talking about stuff you own and can provision at sale, hence the higher price you are let to post.
@jbiloh and admins
I suggest to create a rules thread that is READ-ONLY and to have another one like this here to allow for users to discuss.
Reason: we need a way to simply - and only - see rules and changes! (without glancing over a shit ton of who-knows-what and encountering lots of distraction).
I kindly request a recommendation to not use Virtualizor on LET offers. It seems there are quite a few coincidences which point to Virtualizor having some serious issues. Maybe we need to consider asking providers not to use it.
https://services.lowendtalk.com/index.php?rp=/knowledgebase/3/LowEndTalk-Selling-Guidelines-and-Limitations.html
But sadly on LEB (but not on LET AFAIK)