It’s time for yet another Community Update as the second month of 2015 has officially ended around the globe. We’ve got some interesting bits and pieces that happened this month, among which a follow-up of the EU VAT Rules mentioned in the last update.
As always, if you have any news to report for this update, please PM @CommunityRoundup at LowEndTalk.com to share it.
EU VAT Rules update
Several more US-based providers have announced they will start to charge VAT soon to EU-based customers without at VAT number. This is a result of a new law introduced last year and activated on January 1st that requires every business trading in digital goods and services in the EU should charge VAT in the country of the customer. While this law is a burden to many and I’ve personally haven’t seen any benefits of it for us, the consumers, it’s alive and kicking and companies are following up on it.
Vultr is one of the most recent to announce they will start to charge VAT (effective March 1, 2015) and I’m sure others will have to follow suit soon if the EU doesn’t decide to abandon this new law (or modify it). So, if you do have a valid VAT ID, be sure to put it down where possible to prevent nasty surprises on your invoices.
GVH Customers going to XFuse; GVH DB being used for SPAM
An interesting development followed by a “shocking” development last months. At first it was announced that GVH’s VPS customers would be transferred to XFuse Solutions in a deal with undisclosed conditions. There’s been no details on when anything is going to take place and GVH has seemingly not sent out an e-mail to all of their customers, but if you currently have a VPS with GVH it will soon be moved to XFuse Solutions. Most of the original pricing is going to be honored for now, with some exceptions here and there. Let’s hope (and I have a lot of faith this will happen) that XFuse Solutions will take better care of all those clients.
As a nasty twist to this whole story it seems a former GVH employee had a copy of the GVH client database on his PC. While this may not be a surprise for some, it’s a nasty surprise for others. Especially now that database was supposedly “accidentally” included in the compilation of an e-mail marketing list for said former GVH employee’s new business. So, a word of warning here: if you were a GVH customer last year there’s a big chance that address could be included in future e-mail marketing campaigns, so be on the lookout for e-mails you didn’t sign up for.
Upcoming helpdesk changes
Ever since I’ve taken over the leadership of LEB and LET from Liam, we’ve been struggling with the amount of tickets in the helpdesk and responding to them. As part of my effort to improve things, I will soon add a new and updated template for offers submissions that hosts may (must) use to submit offers for LowEndBox. This new template will save us a lot of work checking tickets to see if all required data is there and it will give you the assurance that your ticket can be processed quickly, and hopefully, without any follow-ups.
Other minor changes that have taken place are the removal of the ‘Critical’ status (as it was just abused) and the removed of several pre-submission checkboxes that were only put in place because of a “bad few”.
New providers
February saw some new providers being listed:
I’m proud to be featuring more new providers and to have heavily brought down the number of “repeat offers”. We’re working hard to continue down this line and we hope you appreciate that!
New author
Jonathan Tan (jcaleb at LET) has joined the LowEndBox authoring team and is now helping me out writing offers. So far he’s written 8 and has done a very good job. Welcome to the team, Jonathan!
Related Posts:
- How to Rapidly Install Java, OpenJDK & Oracle JDK on your VPS - December 14, 2015
- It’s been a great ride - December 14, 2015
- Cheap Windows VPS – $21/quarter 1GB KVM-based Windows VPS in 11 worldwide locations - November 30, 2015
Thank you for the update!! Appreciate all the hard work you and your team put in!!
Also a big thanks to all the LEB providers out there!!
Grats! Sounds good.
For the EU VAT, the main advantage I see is a leveled, fairer market. Until now, some non-EU providers were more competitive only because of not charging VAT. This is not the case anymore and we may see globally a positive effect, even if as customers, we don’t like to pay more.
Another reason to give fake personal info. Now I live in Channel Islands LOL
Best of luck, Jonathan!
thank you
hitherto not understand why I have to pay VAT abroad.
pay enough in this country