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@host_c — when one has a problem with bad customers, one gets rid of them. You should remove just the bad apples, not the whole fruit basket.
If many low-end orders were from scalpers and resellers using bots, and those accounts had many promo offers, simply send a ticket to them to choose and keep just one service at low-end promo price. That way you would have reduced the number of cheap plans due to market crisis, but not reduce the number of clients. This would have also helped identify who uses bots on LET and has many cheap plans, because they would have complained afterwards on LET like any proper MJJ would.
Instead of thinking some logical approach to retain customers with one cheap low-end plan on their account, then have them revisit your portal and maybe your offers in future, you have decided to get rid of all of those plans and all those customers. Hopefully you made a wise decision, I am in no position to judge. In my case, I already made plans to carry on and move my data to another provider. Now I'm just here for the popcorn.
I’m no roots
You do some maintenance when nothing works for dozen or so hours typically once a month, not to mention IP changes, constant changes in plans, offers that require migration because something is already end of line, end of sales, whatever, etc. Get a grip, no pro user will pay a few dollars for a single-homed VPS in Romania, let alone an enterprise one.
RIP my 4x Panama promo. Thanks @host_c for these amazing 2 years. Soon I guess it'll be time to go back to Hostbrrr
@rdes you should fix the quote. This came from @emgh, not @host_c
Goodbye your imaginative collection is not welkomed here.
Cut out the wrong quote, I've already corrected it.
Same here, if a host increases the price by this much, when will they do it again?
Even if I keep my 60$/y service (which is ex taxes, if I'm not mistaken, so I'd be paying a lot more). Will they make it 120$ next year? Hardware prices aren't expected to go down soon...
I wonder what’s the obvious reason, since they didn’t ask for a name? Isn’t this information every company would love to disclose as having enterprise customers make the value of a company go up a lot?
It is not solely a matter of removing bad customers; it is a combination of several problems, i have wrote earlier.
A very large number of these promotional services were ordered using fake names, disposable email addresses, or otherwise unverifiable account information. Therefore, we have no reliable way to distinguish genuine LET members from customers who arrived through other forums, resellers, or account-trading channels. Asking everyone to select one service would not solve that identification problem, and it could also reward those who acquired services through bots or multiple accounts. This would had also been an enormous time consuming effort that i really not see as worth everyone's time.
Secondly, there is the economic issue. The prices of these plans no longer cover the present cost of hardware, replacement parts, drives, RAM, electricity, and general operation. Removing scalpers while preserving one unsustainable service per account would reduce the loss, but it would not resolve the issue.
Therefore, taking both the account-quality problem and the operating costs into consideration, this was the most logical and workable decision for us. We understand that it will cause some friendly fire and that legitimate customers will also decide to leave. We were aware of that when making the decision, and we own it.
I understand your point, and your proposed approach may have worked under different circumstances, let's say if the economics would had been much better, as, we did drag on a few services for a long time while doing what you proposed.
I am not looking for an excuse here, @default. I am simply explaining our decision and the reasons behind it. You may disagree with the decision, that is perfectly fair and fine, yet it was made based on what we can actually work with, while also making it as fair as possible.
Or choose option B:
Just unplugged them the next day in the morning and wish all good luck with the payment processor.
Option C:
KYC on renewal, well, that is a hard no for me.
PS:
Just wait for the fella that put he's account on nodeseeker fore sale/transfer to open a thread here, you will see a tiny part of the issues we are facing.
no they don't, competition is still high, but they can't say damn, maybe we will fuckup with this shitty decision
@default try calculating @host_c 's input cost.
Thank you for your reply. You are right in the sense that I do not agree with you. This is because you are oscillating between two extremes: either +400% on all low-end services or unplugging the whole business. There is no middle ground here and that scares me stiff (while still being able to chew my popcorn and not choke to death).
In your decision you don't want any low-end plans and any low-end customers, while recognizing there are too many such plans and too much work for support to just select one for each customer. This in return begs the question: was the business model relying so much on LET using so many plans? Because if it was, it means it was doomed to fail.
LET is great for advertising (we all know it), but not good for a long-term business models. As one previously said: you just cut down your roots — this is a sign of huge failure, because all that nutrition which you got through your roots will likely turn into decay which will slowly reach the SEO you gained so far. This is just my opinion, hopefully I'm wrong because I don't like to see businesses fail, especially in our troubled times caused by EU leadership.
I think I have already acknowledged that, in my infinite wisdom, we introduced too many extremely cheap promotional plans and that those plans attracted a disproportionate number of scalpers, resellers, fake accounts, and abusive users.
However, the two extremes you describe are not what is happening. We are neither increasing every low-end service by 400% nor unplugging the entire business. Specific unsustainable promotional products are being replaced or discontinued at the end of their existing billing periods and replaced by list priced products with a 20% off.
Some alternatives are higher in specs also then the promotional service held, some are the same.
Customers are receiving alternatives, while their prepaid service remains unchanged until renewal, fact that some go from a promotion of 10 usd / year to a list priced product of 134 USD / year, that is true.
As for storage, services will hover at a ~3-4.5 USD / TB / MO, that price is pretty standard among today, some have higher, some have lower, it is up to the customer to decide to stay or not.
Also the mail was sent with variants to change billing, that is why on the renewed product you have monthly, quarterly and yearly values, some took monthly some took quarterly already.
As for SEO—what SEO? I already underlined that point too.
Will terminating loss leading services and removing scalpers, abusers, and fake accounts damage our image among ordinary list price customers? I doubt it. I think it will go the opposite way, as it seems for a time now.
Those customers continue submitting upgrade requests and purchasing additional resources, so their behaviour does not suggest that they are particularly concerned about the removal of unsustainable promotional products.
Can we agree, at least to some extent, that you are seeing one part of the picture from the outside, while we can see what is actually happening in our own backyard?
You may still disagree with our decision, which is perfectly fair, but you are drawing conclusions without access to the complete operational and financial picture.
PS:
I did not say that all of our decisions were the best while doing thoes promotions, lesson learned - if that was some of you were asking/implying.
You should offer Scalper Special and the Phisher Promo as flash sale promos for $7/year, paid only with cryptocurrency, no refunds, and a mandatory 99% CPU steal in the small text. Available only for the Chinese market.
Tickets Work orders only receive automated replies from an IRC-era markov bot.
Yupp, that will fix the issue, and all of thoes on a Xeon LGA 771 with IDE drives.
Noted
Actually @default here opened a thread that would give tools to Providers to target LET only users in a much more simpler way, then to set QT 50 and hopefully one might get it and then deal with the downfall
Are you saying that KYC instead of massive price increases was a consideration? Because I'd definitely prefer KYC
Why is it a hard no? Is it your opinion that pricing out many customers is more noble than forcing KYC?
Regardless of pricing, you've made it pretty clear throughout the thread that you'd like to have the benefits of KYC, so I'm curious about your aversion to it. Is it a matter of principle, or do you just want to avoid the overhead of KYC?
It's a huge "fuck you" to anyone who values privacy.
I really don't get the KWC need, as I said before, it is a pretty big gun hammer and especially not in an integration with WHMCS, i don't trust WHMCS that much.
A full mandatory KYC for every VPS customer would be overkill. A risk-based verification system would be much better in our case.
I have absolutely no desire to store customers passports or identity cards. Come on, for what? We are selling VPS services, not gold or silver.
As for selfies and other, Facbook, Insta or other have you tagged more then an identity operator, google and apple know more about your habits then you do, and the banks know how and where you spend your money better the you also.
Let's not live in a dream world, shall we?
What matters is that the customer information we hold is truthful and that we can provide accurate information to comply by legal obligations.
If a trusted verification provider confirms that the submitted details are accurate, that is sufficient for me. A simple OK/not-OK would suffice. Hence risk-based verification will extended.
We neither need nor want/wish a copy of the underlying identity document. We are not the FBI
to store that, for fuq sake.
PS: Yes, it is a matter of principle, no operator one should hold your documents, and of line.
So is sending somebody a quote for a 10x price increase. That's a universal "fuck you", regardless of how anyone feels about privacy. And I think it's interesting that they're mentioning an "account-quality problem" as justification for price increases
Even if I wouldn't do KYC for @host_c, I know many others would. GreenCloud does KYC and they've been voted the #1 provider two years in a row
Not just "account-quality problem", it is a mix of that plus the rest, I gave the full picture, please don't take the words out of context.
Is the purge over?
Nop, still waiting for the.
What about the microlxc 'Ro' sponsorship?
Live and kicking, and they will get a new location in RO as soon as I manage to open it.
Same for a dozen or more that we sponsor. ( if by any chance mistakes were made to thoes, open a ticket, Stu will fix it, but that will be on Monday, he went to the Drug Store do get some Vicodin
)
And all the LET 15th Anniversary deals remain as their are:
LET 15th Anniversary IPV6 NVME VPS – HOST-C
LET 15th Anniversary IPV4+IPV6 NVME VPS – HOST-C Edition
LET 15th Anniversary 3TB Storage VPS – HOST-C Edition
Plus the fella from nodeseeker came forward via a ticket, if he is lurking here, I wish to say that I appreciate the gesture. I will deal with the issue later.
I only said that you mentioned it, I didn't mean to imply that it's your only reason
I think this is your paraphrased explanation. I got the impression that account quality is a large part of your reasoning
GreenCloud allowed me to use a utility bill. I hate KYC in general but I think that's a lot more reasonable than what e.g. Hetzner does
Anyways, I just wanted to hear your thoughts. Obviously it sounds like you've considered using it
After the past 3 years of experience, I would even consider fingerprints
Yet , on a more serious note, what we are considering is Fraud Prevention and Account Identity confirmation.
Is it that hard to ask for your legal details ( name and address ) so I can actually put down a decent paper to the IRS at month end ?
I could not care less from where you are, nor your skin color, nor would I sell that info ( why the hack would I do that, it would be extremely disrespectful as a business decision ) and security wise, we are hardening the billing panel, updating it as necessary to stay compliant so your data is safe. ( this is one of the reasons we kept it basic and did not throw custom skins or other over WHMCS that got exploited the past years )
I just wish to have my reporting done correctly, so I don't get a $$$$ USD fine for sending them Bat Man as customer.
Sorry, I was not precise enough:
Finger Prints, Retina Scans, DNA test, Urine Tests, Hair sample.
And here is the why:
All this so
Hello, what is today's excitement?