LowEndBox Team is ready to take offers, check here for criteria and where to send your offers.
All old emails have been cleared, please submit fresh plans and offers. Providers under 12 months old please take note of the updated criteria before submitting your offers.
Latest posts by Chief (see all)
- ServerMania – $4/Month 512MB OpenVZ VPS in Buffalo (NY) USA & Toronto Canada - March 2, 2013
- ChicagoVPS – $21/Quarter 3GB OpenVZ in Atlanta, Buffalo, Chicago and Los Angeles - February 15, 2013
- ChicagoVPS – $7/Month 2GB OpenVZ SSD VPS in Chicago - December 26, 2012
Good! Welcome back
Seconded! Nice strict yet simple criteria too!
Nice to see LEB’s back! Good luck.
Good stuff! :) You should require test IP/file from providers. Looking forward to new providers, so we can tear them apart when we find out they’re using nulled scripts etc. :D
That’s a great idea. I like to see what ping and bandwidth i get before getting a VPS.
Go for it! I’m keen to see how this all works out :P
Getting excited… bring the offers….
I wish the new LEB getting better :)
i hop we can see fresh offer asap
A glitch in the about page?
click on it and enter recaptcha.. :D
Excelent, didn’t noticed that… but thinking again, is a little bit obvious u_u
That’s the point, it isn’t so obvious for e-mail search bots.
yeah me too.. i prefer for like c o n t a c t [at] me [dot] t l d or something. sometimes i’m felt like a spammer when i can’t read those recaptcha text. @_@
good luck new team
We will definitely be making a submission soon, thanks for the good news.
We just can’t wait for your offer.
We can’t wait for another offer form a free template host.
Actually the template isin’t free. You need to buy it(or it is nulled).
Wow, didn’t know it was free; we had to purchase ours from Theme Forest. I bet you’re going to tell me our HostBill, SolusVM, Invision Forum w/ SkinBox Theme, Pingdom, and other services are all free too. Wow, didn’t know. *sarcastic*
good to know ^_^
Thanks God, LEB’s back!
Ah, Rats.. Our domain age is below 12 Months, Therefore none of you can enjoy my wonderful offers.
That is unfortunate. :(
No its not.
The thing with domains is that the admins are going to have to check that someone has had the domain that long and selling VM’s on it.
UptimeVPS has shown how easy it is to buy an aged domain and scam a ton of people by ‘being in the business
for years’
Francisco
Are you sure? I might be wrong but as I understand you can be listed as you don’t use private whois. (less than 12 months old + private whoise = no go?)
Update. As I assumed with valid whois you’re allowed to send offers. Clarified here: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/26805#Comment_26805
In addition to requiring public whois information, I also suggest you look up a company’s registration status, or ask that company to provide the registration number they received when filing their company formation documentation with their local government. Every company that pays taxes must maintain filing status, and will always contain actual names & addresses of the company founders. Requiring that a business is actually a legal entity should be effective in filtering out scammers.
To be honest, theres no reason for a provider over 1 year old to have private WHOIS anyway.
So maybe it should be enforced across all? Just makes sense in my opinion,
There’s at least one provider of long standing with private whois, who is an active user here.
But as Daniel said there’s no valid reason for it.
Please don’t play Net-Nanny and try to protect me from all the bad things out there.
I prefer to be be the judge of what I buy and what I don’t. I don’t want some anonymous “administrator” filtering things according to his/her own specifications and limiting my opportunities to spend my money in any way I see fit.
Rather than censoring offers, develop a classification & tagging system that flags offers for things like “Been around less than a yer” or “Has private whois” or “Likes Bud light”.
Ill take those things into consideration when I decide to buy or not.
totally agree.
In an ideal world, this would make sense. Unfortunately probably 90% of the people who visit this site do not do any research what-so-ever. They blindly click on the link after looking at the RAM and price (just like the old LEA stated) and then come back weeks or months later crying about being scammed. I applaud the new, stricter LEB for making an attempt at cleaning up the LEB market and allow the few legit companies a chance to flourish. As Francisco stated before, having a “cleaner” LEB market will benefit the clients and the companies. The “pump and dump” and fly-by-night providers actually hurt other LEB providers which in return hurt the clients that use them.
The old LEA attempted the other route and unfortunately it didn’t work. I suggested a scoring system, but that only works if people actually read it… it sucks having to cater to those types of people, but if they make up the majority of your visitors then LEB would be smart to adapt.
The benefit to the stricter requirements is that LEB providers will actually be held to a higher standard and be required to do things that a real company should already have done. Somebody suggested that the provider be a real registered company that paid taxes, but that’s pushing it a little to far since there are so few of us out there.
How it didn’t work? Look at influence and community he built. Many of us share same thoughts on the matter with sleddog but established hosts making good earning with lowendbox.com of course support new LEB direction.
It didn’t work because he left. He gave up hundreds of dollars a month because of it. How long would the new LEA last if he continued on the same path?
Sorry, but I think that “90% of the people” stuff is just made-up stats to support your opinion, or the original LEA’s opinion, whatever. It’s just a way of making an opinion look good, it has no factual basis, and it’s impossible to support or disprove. 95% of the people who read this will agree with me but won’t post a reply. There.
If the problem really is that people are just “looking at the RAM and price” then STOP SCREAMING IT IN THE HEADLINE of every post, in exactly the same manner for every offer, and burying any caveats in a sentence in the third paragraph.
Collate and present information in a manner that visually represents the credibility of the offer and the provider. Every offer doesn’t need to be presented in exactly the same manner.
And I seriously doubt that new rules on this website are going to have any impact whatever on the LEB market. There will always be new startups, some will fail, some will success. The difference is, people will go somewhere else to find them.
“Rules” seldom fix problems, they just provide ways to avoid the issues. If this site really wants to have an affect on the LEB market it needs to take a lead role in addressing the issues head on. That’s difficult. Avoidance is the easy route.
90% was a conservative estimate (with the word probably in front of it). I would guess it’s closer to 95%, it’s probably the same percentage of people who read the Terms of Service before signing up to anything.
LEB.com is the face of the LEB market. It’s the only LEB website recommended on WHT and thus is the default site to find LEBs. If people continue to get scammed based on providers listed on here then the chances of that cycle continuing will be slim. If LEB.com continues to be the primary source of LEB providers then it needs to do something to force providers to act like professionals, with these rules it’s setting a higher standard for LEB providers.
I’m interested to hear more about this “taking a leading role in addressing the issue” approach though. I may be looking at this thing all wrong and would like to hear some alternatives for me and the rest of the community to get behind.
KuJoe wrote: “I’m interested to hear more about this “taking a leading role in addressing the issue” approach though.”
I think I already gave my suggestions. Change the format and layout. Find innovative new ways of representing the information and presenting it to viewers. Stop screaming prices and ram as the be-all and end-all. Integrate some history, so I can see that a provider has now made 8 offers, and I can click and see a synopsis. If the information is organized on the backend, there’s many ways of presenting it. Click, click… hmmm, look at that: all the $5 2GB VPSs are first offers from new companies…
Diversify the site to engage the community with content outside of offers: new VPS technologies, what’s hot and what sucks; a provider interview here and there; more howtos for the advanced crowd; introductory best practises for newbies so they learn the right way to manage that first server. Don’t forgot about that “Yes You Can…” post by LEA from way back. Posts like that did a lot to build the credibility of this site. It’s important to build on that legacy, and not let this site become simply a Dollar Store for VPS services.
I second to that!
hell yeahh!!! LEB its back !!
This is great news, good luck to new admin’s
Good news. Good to be back.
So I guess I’m the only one who missed who these guys actually are?
Or do they want to stay anonymous?
My guess goes out to a trio of DrMike and the buyvm forum guys.
Its neither of them, trust me. Good to see LEB getting back into the swing of things and hopefully the new criteria will see less “ken’s” getting listed :P
I almost can’t believe he would trust anybody else.
The upcoming weeks will be CRITICAL to show if LEB will still be worth visiting.
How important is for a provider owning his equipment? I do value my time, so when i have to setup a new VPS i consider that a cost and an annoyance. I try to have only 6+ months contracts, so a host not deadpooling soon is really important. There are 3 things i always look: Real company, established business and owned equipment. All come to the same point: the provider has to risk and invest his own money. For me that’s the best guarantee he will really try hard to be in business in 6 months. Good or not he must have a business plan and a strategy. So knowing he spent to buy a cage and installed his own hardware for me is more important than reading i can have 2 gb ram an 10tb for 5usd. Owning hardware means his ROI will be higher and will be more happy to sustain his offer and grow in future. Considering owned hardware an important thing allowed me to risk and pick 2 yearly VPS from SD (a startup in 2011!) at a very good price (his introductory offer) because he proved he invested in his business project. And i’m glad i did.
So my suggestion is to completely stop listing secretive kids hiding after a private whois and (over)selling a rented node to pay for their gameserver. We had (no offence to LEA) too many offers of providers deadpooled after a few months. Let’s stop calling them ‘providers’ it’s offensive to serious LEB business and the many honest providers here. LEB market has grown mature. I hope CHIEF will be much more selective. 1 offer for quarter for existing providers and rookies allowed only if they prove they have a decent offer and business plan.
What about instead of focusing in advertisements/promotions submitted by providers LEB.com focus on reviews submitted by users? This way the providers could be 2 days old or 2 years old as long as the user’s review is well written and provides some way to verify they are actual clients and not the providers themselves (i.e. active domain hosted on the provider, screenshot of invoice, etc…). If there’s any doubt of whether or not providers would fake it we can even put an “uptime requirement” so if the VPS only has an uptime of a X hours/days it would not be posted.
every pun’n’dump will have great reviews during the first few weeks. Every oversold node with a too good to be true offer will perform great for the first customers. Only time can tell if your business model is sustainable. Problem is that many so called ‘providers’ here have no business model, did no investment and will fail at the first problem, being a DDOS, a hardware failure or their provider disconnecting for allowing abusive users on their only server or not paying their bills. So even honest *performance* reviews mean nothing for a startup. All empty servers perform great. And i’m against the uptime myth too. Kernel and hardware maintenance and upgrade are a good thing, even if they reset your uptime. Additionally reviews done by inexperienced persons have little value. Same for useless DD tests (i/o *write* speed of 50 MB/s or 170 have little difference in real world, maybe it’s useful for torrenters, but not everyone here is in the pirating business) or download (why download and not upload?) speed of cachefly 100mb.test sometimes from the same datacenter.
I expect LEB to give much more than a list of offers with some end user reviews.
As a person that views these offers, there is a few things I would love to see.
1) All people that submits an offer have to state if they are a legal business or not in their country (and if so, to provide some proof).
2) State who they are within the offer. So you would have something like – John Doe, Head of Marketing from Unknown Company sent this offer in.
3) A valid about page on their website with who they are, how long they been in business (and if this matches their whois details and if not, why not) and hopefully a section on their about page with their business plan.
Just a few things I would like to throw out there.
I like this suggestion. +1
Proof I am a legal business in the US is I exist. There is no law that you cannot operate as a sole proprietor, and as a sole proprietor there are no laws you have to register with anything or any licensing. And before Joe Smartguy chimes in, yes, you would as a Doctor, Lawyer … whatever, but not as a service provider.
If you’re referring to me then I never once said it was a law or a requirement. I’m just saying it’s in the best interest for the clients as well as the company to be a legal business entity.
I dunno how you think I was talking about you, “Joe Smartguy” is generic, like Joe Sixpack or John Doe
Actually, its in the clients best interests if you are not a registered business, as they can sue you personally for all your assets including your house and cars. Compared to suing the register business, which with an amount of these companies having no assets and simply renting dedicated’s split up and resold.
@Johnathan That’s true but it’s a double-edge sword because if they are not registered than the chances of their contact information being correct are not as high as if they are registered. I also think that the chances of them running in the middle of the night are quite a bit lower if they are a registered company.
To be honest, I’d rather go with a provider that isn’t going to do a runner, instead of going with a provider I can sue directly after he does. Assuming I can even find out who he is.
Agree with most of that, I am yet to see a single business plan posted on a company website, that sort of thing is a constantly evolving internal document, perhaps a mission statement would be OK.
I think generally people are going a bit overboard with the posting requirements, sure some fundamentals are OK but its not like people ask for individuals certificate for food hygiene and preparation before ordering some take away food (which probably costs more than most of the offers)
The take away food analogy is a good one, what they offer in pictures is rarely what you get in reality, you wont find their business plan on the front desk, and ordering food from some of these places can be a hazard to your health, yet most people form their own opinions about a place based on not much but face value and pay about the same as most of the offers here and probably multiple times per month.
Not that I am suggesting that LEB is full of fast food style hosts but I think a little perspective could go along way, it seems lots of people were sad to see that THIS site in its current form could be closing, a few tweaks here and there are fine for refinement but changing the fundamentals will change the fundamental reasons people liked it in the first place, that may not be a good thing.
When are we going to see offers posted :)
Welcome back LEB
Welcome back…. :)
Nice, offer sent to LEA :)
We now have a HEAP of offers to sort through, including some new hosts not featured before and a couple of recent startups.
The rollout starts tomorrow, thank you again to all the providers both new and current that provided LEB offers.
Awesome … can’t wait.
You had a heap of offers but it seems like only one has been posted per day, is this going to be a trend? Is there going to be a backup of offers when they are sent in?
Quite a few offers from what i am seeing!
This should be interesting “Chief”, Let’s see’ em! :-)
How many on average are you going to post a day?
We’re glad, that LEB/LET continues to live ;-)
All the best to you LE-Admins!
Gerhard and the EDIS Crew
Nice to see The LEB’s Back .. Missed this awesome offers …
Welcome back