<RANT>
I have just looked at my inbox and saw around 10 emails that I have received since late Friday which I have not yet actioned — 10 from various hosting providers trying to have their offers posted here. Looking back I have posted over 30 low end offers since the beginning of this month. A bit excessive I found. Not to mention the amount of time spent on background checks and posting the actual offers. And who knows how many of them are just going to do a “Ben Harper” of RackVM?
Not to mention LowEndBox was supposed to be my “spare time” hobby. Unfortunately my “spare time” has been scarce lately due to some up-coming changes in life. As you can see I really do not have time to post every offer people threw at me. I also hate to see LowEndBox becoming “just a cheap advertisement platform” for the budget hosting providers — although I think it might have already been the case.
Therefore I am going to make some changes here. I will reduce the frequency of posts, and tighten up the criteria.
- I will not post new offers from providers which I have previously posted over the last 30 days. Those weekly “reminder emails” are getting really annoying. Unless it is an exceptionally good offer — but I’ll be the judge on what is “exceptional”.
- I will not accept annual payment offers from providers that have been around for less than one year. How can I have any confident that you will finish year 2, when you are still stuck in year 1? I will use domain age as an indicator.
- Annual payment threshold is now capped at $60/year (~$5/month). People should expect appropriate discount if they are asked to pay for the whole year upfront.
And sorry for those who have already emailed me asking to be “featured” — I don’t really have time to respond to all of you. If you don’t fit the criteria, your request might be silently ignored.
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
10 Emails, Consider yourself lucky lol i get about 30 a Day. Mostly bills but still…
Ha. I do get a lot more emails for my multiple alter ego. Those 10 are just providers trying to get their offers posted here.
Do you really get weekly reminder? Wow, that’s too much, bro. Especially when there is no “exceptional” offer and the offer is the same from time to time.
Just like listening to an old crappy 8 tracks that repeats the same lousy song on and on. Heh heh heh :)
Thumbs up to your effort to keep this website to the original idea on providing good information on quality Low End Boxes. Yep, we really need it.
Maybe a sh*t list is in order for those hosts who constantly email you over and over again?
So, are you going to post them up?
(PS: I’m not one of them.. lol :P)
Positive that you took the time to take a step back, watched your website and thought about the things you did not like about the current way it was going. Posted the changes that you thought are needed to set the site back on the right track, good job!
Only point of criticism is that you do not want to post budget providers and on the other hand set a threshold of $60/year for annual offers.
Cutting the threshold is just a way to reduce the frequency, and the main aim here is priority against those offering *only* annual payments.
Good move. Thanks for setting up this helpful site.
i’d love to know when the VPS provider is a real company like burstnet, linode (with vat number and a real office etc) doing businesses or just a boy trying to earn some money.
And i prefer to spend a dollar more on a proposal from a legit company with a business model than on a cheap vps sold by someone hiding behind a nickname with a domain registered with privacy guard.
Yeah,, i have linode.. and they support is unremarkable.. need less than 5 minutes to answering my ticket O_o oh i’m asking them to move my node from newark into fremont.. less than 10 minutes all set without corrupted data and bla2.. i know we’re talking about price.. but what about quality of service? more people is not seeing price/cost for their choice, they often saw how much costumer service making him/her happy..
> and they support is unremarkable..
I think you meant to say “IS remarkable” :)
Other than that, I could NEVER justify a whopping $20/month for a Linode, that is way too much, especially considering I do not earn money from my websites at all. So I just used a crappy shared hosting.
My first VPS was from an offer here on LEB, shortly after I discovered the site, and since then I never looked back. VPSes are much more fun, and LEB really helps bring them “to the people”. :)
My “bread and butter” website is hosted on Linode(s), and I can see how my $80/month for 2x Linode 1024 is easily justified, when you have enough performance that do average 50-75 HTTP requests/sec and support staffs that notify you and fix things up proactively.
But low end VPS’s have their uses and I would not compare them with my Linode’s.
Linode had a promo one month ago, you could get the 512k for 30 usd/6.5 months, that’s about 4.6 usd per month. It was posted on LET, not here. I guess Linode did not send the request for advertising to LEA, so not everyone here was aware of the limited offer.
Thx to LEB i’ve been able to get many great vps, so i love this site. Sometimes there’s just too many useless one-boy reseller offers, that’s why i suggest to divide resellers and one boy businesses from real legit companies.
wuppsss sorry typo, thanks for your correction.. :D yup thats why i’m here too.. i have 3 low end VPS because LEB.. citynethost+enotch+curlhost (2.5 + 5.95 + 6.5 total US$14.95!!)
I could guess providers doing semi-annual offer to get around the limit. Though that would be a good thing as annual is really TOO LONG, and it would be less money to lose in case of a fraudulent provider.
Hi there,
I was drawn to this site when I first got into VPS’s (worked as hosting support tech for a while). I was amazed by the good posts about your great posts about how to run your own low end box (ie. memory optimization and all). Then you started posting more and more advertisements, so I stopped caring about the blog – I was so many times close to cancelling the rss subscription, it became pure advertisement platform you’re talking about.
My suggestion would be to really cut down on that kind of posts and do a post on lighttpd alternatives or something – that would make me want to come back here. But that’s just me.
I pretty much agree with Zlatko. I came originally for the excellent technical content, stayed (RSS-)subscribed because that and a small selection of well-curated offers was valuable, but am starting to find that your content has shifted focus too much for me.
Have you considered dropping the “offers” posts entirely, and just running a monthly round-up? Obviously, good offers from solid businesses (such as burstNET and linode, as marrco mentioned) would still merit their own posts.
A few ideas for technical posts (apologies if you’ve already covered these, but it’s early and I haven’t yet had my coffee): lowend forum software options and configuration, using multiple VPSs and geoIP for building your own CDN, openvpn server configuration, lowend capacity monitoring, lowend uptime monitoring, …
Thanks for the suggestions — Zlatko and Rob. I know what you meant that it looks more and more spammy — and I am actually the one that post those ads :) Even worse, I get pretty much $0 reimbursement for posting those. Ha!
As I have said, I have an up-coming circumstances change and hopefully I get to post more useful stuff after I get over that hurdle.
I would like to thank you for your efforts here, without it I would have never found a good VPS host.
One thing about your criteria though, using the domain name age is not really a good indicator, as I have noticed new people are buying old domains that are related to hosting and using those to start up their new business.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
Great idea.
When your hobby starts feeling like work, you have a choice to make.
You should tighten up the criteria! and the criteria that you propose are good.
This clearly needs to be turned into a full-time business, my friend, you simply need to figure out how.
I would start with branching out into running ads for much bigger and richer companies, like ServerBeach and RackSpace.
Too many ‘meh’ offers – that I can say for sure.
For example WTF are these:
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/gidux-5-95-128mb-openvz-vps/
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/rethinkvps-5-95-128mb-openvz-vps-with-gbps-unmetered/
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/agent-black-web-hosting-6-84-192mb-openvz-vps/
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/plasawebhost-6-49-128mb-openvz-vps/
Might as well not wasted time posting them.
You should take into account not just a threshold (“less than $7”), but also “bang for the buck” ratio.
I think it is pretty established that today $6 gets you not 128-192 but 512 MB, and from a reputable provider too (not a new kid like some of these links). And that’s not even mentioning other resources like data transfer.
I agree that those you have listed are indeed “meh” offers. I *was* interested in the life-cycle of those low end providers — how quickly they die and then reborn in a different name. However I am indeed bored and tired of tracking the who’s who in the web hosting dirty laundry…
I don’t believe you are fair in considering our offer as a “meh” offer. We maintain a high quality network as well as refuse to oversell our services. This gives you the client the service that you expect and this all comes at a cost.
When we asked for our offer to be posted, we were looking for good quality clients, not those who wish to turn their VPS machines into a spam producing machine or worse. We apologize that you did not like the initial offer, however we received several inquiries about possibly increasing the specifications on those plans, which we did. However, what was not included in the original posting was the fact that we DOUBLED your storage space AND bandwidth.
Later on, several people inquired about an increase in memory on those machines. We took it under advisement, and as the comments section shows, we increased the memory available to the low end box users. We feel that you are getting a great quality machine at a very fair and competitive price. It would be unfair for a low end box user to expect specifications very near a dedicated machine for just 7$ a month as that would cause any company to oversell the nodes just to make enough money to cover it’s cost. This would in turn cause performance and reliability issues and would not be acceptable.
As LowEndAdmin stated, these VPS machines that are offered to Low End Box readers are in our Softlayer Dallas Datacenter. We have recently expanded our capacity in that center as the demand for the machines has grown.
We pride ourselves on bringing our clients the best quality service that they deserve and expect, and we refuse to provide sub-par quality or support. We have been in business since 2008, and do not plan on going anywhere anytime soon.
We applaud LowEndAdmin on doing fact checking. It’s something that not many people do. We also applaud LowEndAdmin for making some of these new changes to better reflect the original intent of Low End Box website. There are several providers on the market who are shady and are out just to make a quick dollar. We take pride in NOT being one of them.
I would be open to discussing any issues anyone may have with our offer, and work with you to find something to suite your needs, even if it is not with us. We have no problem pointing you to a host if you find that our services do not fit in your budget constraints.
Respectfully Submitted,
James M.
Agent Black Web Hosting
@James — I think there is no point of being apologetic. It’s a cut throat industry and I can easily understand why some providers don’t want to compete on price alone. However you guys are new. Just make sure you guys stay above the water and continue to build reputation :)
Thanks for the kind words LEA. We take pride in our reputation and work daily to protect it. We don’t spam forums with ads like many you see on WHT, nor do we spam clients of other hosts trying to get them to switch (which has happened to us surprisingly.) We let the quality of our service and the word of our clients speak for themselves.
Respectfully,
James M
Agent Black Web Hosting
If you could somehow control the influx of most resellers that’d be great too. A good 1/4 of the listings that go up on here are some burstnet reseller charging a buck or two extra as you’ve always pointed out.
You’re going to feel a slow down in listings in the next 6 months as well as IP addresses dry up and only providers with ARIN blocks will be able to get anywhere. :)
Francisco
Actually this is something to seriously consider, hear me out.
In the coming months you’re going to see every dedicated/colocation provider start to cap how many IP’s a dedicated can have and or boost the price heavily (think $10/m/ip+). The only direct owners will be people with ARIN blocks and everyone else will end up reselling them if they can.
I know HE/BurstNET/Softlayer are going to start heavily capping the allowed IP’s per box just to make sure they don’t run out. HE got a /15 just last year but they were almost out half of it last I checked.
Francisco
Off-topic, so would getting more IPs now a good “investment”? I could top up all my servers to 8 or 16 IPs now and I doubt they can charge you more later.
Everyone is going to go back to increase prices.
When IPv4 is out, it’s out. They might get some blocks returned but it’ll be so rare that it’s not something to book on.
I’m probably going to start a thread on LET documenting my predictions in the morning ;)
Francisco
I agree with what Francisco just brought up. My prediction upon the IPv4 is, there will be one or two years of price uncertainty just like the dot com boom when a domain name can cost you more than $50/year. This will be back to normal when the IPv6 infrastructures are ready and everybody start using IPv6.
In my opinion, if you are a provider, unless your business is as large as Linode and other big boys that have unlimited resource, start training yourself providing IPv6 and educate the Users about the IPV6. A small step by providing the IPv6 now to your customers, will benefit you in the long run.
Also, domain age is a poor marker for these things since a person getting their hands on an aged domain isn’t a big deal.
I’m emailing you a trick with WHMCS that will help in this :)
Francisco
Can you make it public or contact me that info too?
Same here. My email is: klikli ~at~ ymail.com
NO SPAM PLEASE!
To answer the posted question in general – I don’t think 1-3 posts per day is “too many”. I understand that posting them takes effort – but if you’re concerned if your readers are overwhelmed by quantity or not, I’d say no, we are not. :) To the contrary, I always enjoy when I see in my RSS that you posted something new. This is great stuff, and you’re making it happen. More people now can afford/justify VPSes, they learn some useful GNU/Linux skills, they get a stable platform for sharing their creations with the world — all of this could otherwise never happen.
Of course you guys are not concerning about quantity :) I go through ~100 RSS items a day and have no problem skimming through! I am just saying producing takes a lot more time than consuming. I don’t think posting 2-3 offers a day is sustainable for me, especially when I am making bugger all on this website to make the effort worthwhile.
Glad to hear it mate. It’s cool to hear all the latest offers but there’s little differenciation at the moment which is a shame :(.
Why don’t you think about getting some others involved? I’d be happy to help
I agree with this, you do a great job for us, and I’m sure others appreciate it just as much as me.
I agree and I think your rules are justified based on your explanation.
I completely agree with you!
Completely agree.
Time was when some of the deals at 7usd pm were exceptional if they gave 256mb ram.
Time has moved on and you have posted a couple of 1gb deals
For me, I want a vps for a year – and to be sure it will be there for a year.
Perhaps you want to reconsider what LEB is for – when you do not have to manually trim wordpress to fit in the memoryspace anymore.
I for one, look forward to VNC on Android and the challenges of getting an efficiently working remote desktop.
Each time I want to buy a cheap VPS, I used to be going here firstly. Downgrade your frequency of posts will influence your site’s frequency of visits, I think.
I dunno, it seems like he’s going to ditch the lower quality offers. That’d make me more likely to come here to see the offers, not having to wade through crappy burst resellers and month-old chancers wanting me to pay a year up front.
one more idea: to limit the amount of kiddie hosts, why not refuse to post offers with website on adjacent nameservers?
That’d pretty much negate 90% of the hosts out there.
@LEA: You already have a fantastic service. However, one thing I notice is, the site could be more organized and automated. It seems the way it works is ppl email you, you post the details. I may be missing something, but this is how I suggest you can speed up as well as add more features to the site:
1) Automatically check whether a domain is privacy protected. Automatically check age of domain.
2) Store each offer in a DB. Have columns for fields like RAM, Burst RAM, type of virtualization, company, bw, cost, etc etc.
This will allow people to sort offers by price, by domain age, etc. I don’t know who owns it, but lowenddedi, who acknowledge
they are inspired by lowendbox, seem to have done this to some degree.
3) Have a form, which providers can fill. You just need to approve/reject and add your 10 cents to it (a note) before approving.
Sorry if I sound like advising :), but – I like the site, and would love to see it improve and grow.
@JP,
At the end of last year, I have bought a domain intending to do the same as your ideas. I have not much free time, but it will be done soon.
http://www.vpsindex.com
@JP — yes automation would be good. In terms of checking — simple checks like domain are already automated + hourly tracking on their website’s availability. The complexity is usually involving with digging into WHT, LinkedIn and Facebook to do some background checks :)
Yes an “index” would be useful. However a lot of offers here are time limited, which makes building a table a bit useless. The offers would have expired by the time they reach 3rd/4th page.
You could move away from “OFFER” prices to everyday low prices. Discard all time limited offers, they keep repeating every month anyway that they can make it permanent instead.
Opposite from some of you I prefer to see all posabilities, all offers for few bucks and then try to pick best one. Not so long ago there was like 5 or 6 “low end box” hosts, now we see them in hudreds and that’s great.
Of course because all that there’s much more of crap but still… many those crappy non reliable low end hosts indirectly helped with LEB featuring to make something like this popular. To build community. Nowaday it seems like “everyone” try to have some low end boxes offer available for customers and that’s great. With more of them increase crap but also competition. Lets keep them at LEB!
P.S. oh and those spoiled LEB tasters which consider 128mb box for 5$ as worthless… you lost sense of reality! Just because some crappy hosts offer for same money 512MB memory this doesn’t make 128mb hosts for those few bucks by default worthless. By my experiences (and I am not only LEB “TASTER” – but some of them actually use) 128/256mb 5$ offer can ofter beat those crappy too good to be true 512mb 5$ offers in term of performance and professionality.
Don’t limit vps host featuring at LEB regarding resources offered. Just because some hosts are more realistic and responsible regarding this, it doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve to be featured here.
I totally agree with you. :)
JUST A CLARIFICATION. If people actually read my post, I *AM* going to post most offers I found and/or forwarded to me. What I won’t post are:
– Annual offers from new providers
– Repeated offers from the same providers, as I will only post one from each provider every 30 days.
So you guys are still going to see most providers, even the crappy ones. I guess I was just fed up by providers who send me *EXACTLY THE SAME OFFER* every week.
How about having a section on LET where providers can post their offers, and then through discussion etc LEA can decide which ones are worth posting on the front page? Then the LET users can do most of the investigative legwork, leaving LEA to only harvest the best ones and post them on LEB?
I agree with Gary. Make a discussion, where every provider can post their low-end offers via post form. Than users can review them, and give them karma, based on their hosting/offer. After a provider’s account is (for example) 1 month old on the forum, and he has “25x” positive karma, then he can post his offer in the trusted thread, and those will be seen on blog.
In this way the forum will be much more visited, and only the trusted offers will have to appear on the blog.
Any voting based karma system will be gamed. Instead you could base karma on how old the domain is and other such things that can’t be gamed.
This is a good idea if it can be implemented in a fair manner. Right now there is a hint of self promotion going on in LET, nothing I would complain about, but it could get out of hand if the community were to grow a sizable amount. Currently the community is small enough that this is not a problem.
That’s a good Idea Gary & Benga and I also agree with mitgib that the rapid growth of this community is something to be considered of. (Not to mention the case that a thread might slowly changed into a support panel).
ditto
Interesting LEA. Good decission. When I started to read, I thought you were talking about the posibility of consider a collaborator for the blog. Do you considered that posibility?
@LEA: Please consider weeding out all those offers from providers who either
– hide their WHOIS information
– do not publish their postal address on their website
– use the address of the datacenter they are using as their WHOIS information
– use the address of a virtual office or mailbox as their WHOIS information
I really find it fascinating how many providers expect me to entrust them with my home address, phone number, possibly credit card details and let them perform a fraud check on me while they basically remain anonymous.
So you want to have 3-5 lowend providers in a year on lowendbox?
The b-grade providers could always just get their shit together and sort their DNS, their whois info, etc.
And perhaps if the bigger and more reliable providers aren’t as worried about their offers being drowned out by $1/month crap, they’ll be more inclined to submit their own offers…
I agree there has been too much crap posted lately. Let companies earn a positive reputation
before posting for them here.
The only downside to this is new companies usually open with crazy offers and we might miss
out occasionally.
But then LEB lost it’s purpose partially. What we want is new “discovery”. Ok, it’s always great to get good deal from reputable company, but those deals are rare. It’s always exciting to see new great deal from company hosted in some for us unknown new DC instead those standard locations :)
Among all this crap each of us found some nice, usable low end vps hosts which we didn’t know before and this count.
I actually don’t have problem with new discovery & new companies. I just won’t report their offers that require annual payments.
Yes, of course, that’s quite reasonable.
My both replays in this thread was mainly for those which suggested all kind requirements which would practically remove from LEB either all new non reputable hosts (which I don’t consider as good idea), either to remove all those which for 5 bucks don’t give us heaven… but instead this realistic resources (which removal also isn’t good idea).
No one force us to buy anything. Everyone is resposnible only for him/herself. But it’s nice too see all “low end box” options at one place – this blog (as it is now).
Don’t blame ya LEA. Especially since you’re making nothing and helping scam artists reap the benefits of your sites popularity.
I agree But You say “since you’re making nothing and helping scam artists reap the benefits of your sites popularity.”
What about the ads?
Ads? It’s makes no difference like in life outside LEB. Millions of adds at google, TV, radio… and it’s not like anyone from us would care… Buying something is our personal responsability.
Yeah, forgot about the ads. Either way, he’s helping scam artists. Just chop out the making nothing bit and my comment is still valid.
I also want to clarify i’m not blaming LEA at all. :/
What?! You are not using AdBlock Plus and still see ads?!
Seriously. I was talking about affiliation links. All you guys who run (or used to run) hosting companies know what I am talking about, as well as these guys who run those “hosting comparison sites”. I have taken my stance on no affiliation links, and tried to always make disclaimer if I use the provider I blogged about.
Good point LEA.
From my point of view, the ads on the right side is only a couple of decorations because the real add is the LEB content itself including the link attached to poster’s name, and you never place any affiliation link on the posted offers. Otherwise, you would have become a millionaire by now.
Imagine if only 20% of the monthly hit buy a VPS through LEB imaginary affiliate link, and each successful purchase generate 10%, just do the math.
I’m grateful that you always do the best to keep you clean from unbiased offer. Frankly, this site might not generate much dollars, but it certainly generate goodwill and many thankful people when they dig into this site and find what they’re looking for.
What is LET?
LowEndTalk.com may be
I strongly agree with your revamp of the requirements to get posted. Might I suggest you no longer consider offers that are no recurring except in the case of a major offer. I know I just dont read anything that is not recurring.
LEA,
Please post more how-to’s or guides that would work on lowend boxes! that would be great! Btw, Good Job!
I agree with your post. I used to come here and find only excelent offers, now they all look the same — Since that time I also found some very annoying and unprofessional hosts ( f.e. ForeverHosting – Never go there ).
It’s really necessaire to have a score to decide which VPS is good in aspect of services (not only performance). If there is one, I’d like to introduce to http://www.vpsindex.com
This is not the way to promote a website.
I guess i am one of those rare people who loves the website just the way it is. Some of the offers do look a little redundant, but still, the site kicked ass. My 2cents “you should mantain the site content as it is and try to figure out a way to monetize it in some way so its worth your while”
I think the same as you say, I have found some posts on here which the service and the servers were absolute shite to be frank, the offers seem to just come from people wanting a buck, well some of, I know it can happen like.
But it has done well, should be proud of your work, just some idiot hosts trying to nag you, simply because they cant make money themself.
I would charge people who email you to post adverts about them to be frank.
I wish LEB for the future, great setup and people round here!
I for one think that any host that offers their services via spam or allows spam to come from their network should not be posted. I realize that checking for that just adds more work to your list but I’ve been meaning to bring it up for a while now. Besides my lovely adventure with that host who’s name I won;t sully this comment with, there’s been about a half dozen within the last few months that I’ve had in my router blocks for quite some time that have been listed before.
Maybe if you could offload some of your background work? I’m sure some of us here could run through your checklist and send you back the results when you get a new offer. I know with me after a couple of hours, I’m looking for something to stretch my minds instead of writing “Can you check your webserver’s error logs?” for the 30th time of the day.
The number of Burst resellers was one of the first things that came to mind as well as noted up above.
Maybe having the host themselves fill out your checklist as a requirement when they send in their offer would also lighten your load? Make them do the work.
For easy tasks that can be automated are pretty much already automated.
Most of the time it’s trying to figure out the host’s history, the age of the sole owner (in case of high school or college kids), and what other hosting companies he/she has previously started and dumped. Those can possibility be automated but I won’t have time to write that much code at the moment.
Or people can contribute their findings in the comments. Do need to be careful about private information though.
As of BurstNet resellers — there’s a difference between reseller of their VPS products, and those who got dedicated servers from BurstNet and sell VPS on top. For the actual resellers, you’ll find that I don’t list them unless they are cheaper than BurstNet themselves.
Hi,
While a relative newbie to this site, would it not be possible to put all the offers into a table that could just be viewed, a permalink if you will to the latest offers and then “let the people” decide? Perhaps a credibility rating / optional existing customer reviews?
Just my 2p’s worth!
M
I believe there’s a page for that on the wiki. Not sure how long it;s been since it was updated though:
http://www.lowendbox.com/wiki/
So rather than posting on the blog, perhaps a group of us could update the table in the wiki, set-up a LEB mailing list where all the offer get sent then as a community effort update the table? Should take a load of the LEA and allow all the offers to be seen…. Then could do the more sophisticated stuff if people want….
M
Too many comments here for me to read, so I apologize if someone already said something like this:
When I read your blog I primarily look for best deals in four categories: OpenVZ, Xen / VMWare, dedicated, and Windows. If other people do the same perhaps you could decrease your mail volume and the number of postings by making your requirements more complicated so you only need show best-in-class offers.
A bit more organizaton might make the site more useful for us and easier to maintain for you. It seems there are two kinds of posts. There are limited time special offers and there are a large group of companies that I would consider “The Regulars”, who’s standard price is under the $7 threshold and who show up over and over again. It might be good to put all of these in a separate category so you don’t have to keep rposting them. You could also hang all the “Yet Another Burstnet Resellers” under Burstnet in this area. I’m not sure how much work this would be to do but it would add some useful information/orgainization and cut down on the spam and reposting.
I agree that offloading some work to reputable community members would be a good idea. Instead of having an email inbox for new offers maybe we could have a small app put together where a provider can submit their offer which then goes into a queue that certain people have access to and can weed out the offers.
Basically moderators who vet the offers, add comments, do background on the company, etc… approved offers get sent on down the line to the LE-Boss.. :) ..who can add final comments and post the offer for the world. Of course if any providers are moderators have to make sure they do not vet themselves and make sure impartiality is priority.
Requiring providers to have X karma in the forum is a good idea in theory but also you can’t keep it too high of a bar to get to for new community members otherwise good providers/deals might be passed up.
Gotta admit that I like the prefill form suggest I made more. At the very least for a start. That way LEA has the data in front of him. Also glaring decencies would be obvious. Like nameservers sitting by each other. Also would show that the provider is serious in what they do, shows a basic efficiency and some knowledge. Hopefully at least.
The concern I have, which I thought of after I posted what I did, is that not everybody has equal levels of access to background material. I know I have router logs that go about about 18 months so I can check spam runs across IP addresses. Patrick, you may be really good at digging out Ip ranges to see what datacenter a provider sits in, which is something I suck at.
Just wanted to throw that out.
That’s one of the reasons I thought some manually vetting would be better though. While some things can be automated to help those checking nothing beats a human
…except a super smart robot
By the way, I don;t think anyone of us here are saying that you should do what we suggest, LEA. It is your site after all. We’re just throwing out suggestions.
Sure would be cool if LEA did though :) but you’re right. Just some community brainstorming. If an idea is used – woo hoo! If not oh well, no harm done.
Certainly! It’s all your privilege LEA, and whatever decision you make just go back your initial principle: it’s a hobby (I hope you don’t lose your interest in it), provide best information (you’ve tried the best to provide it here so far) and set the rules just to make life easier (you did it from time to time).
We just throw in suggestion because we love LEB and I personally want to be a part of a good community like this one.
Oh one more thing. Never ever think that LowEndBox becoming “just a cheap advertisement platform” for the budget hosting providers! LowEndBox is more than that!
Remember you are only posting the best available offer at the market at a certain time. And sometimes in a period of time, say within a week, there are no good offer, but it fits the criteria, so it’s not you to be blamed for the bad content but the content just reflects the real condition of the market.
I think a good option would be for “guest posts” or something of that sort. If multiple people in the community chipped in and someone every now and then wrote a good “how to” post or put together some really useful info then it could be posted to the blog maybe? I know the wiki is there and we could put stuff in there but the blog would probably get more views and do more good in the blog since 90% of the visitors to the blog probably don’t know the wiki exists? I saw a comment in the blog
I mean look at comment #26… (sorry hikkymemo) I think LET is more prominent than the wiki. Maybe the wiki just needs more good content in it.
Time for us to get to work!!!
Suggestion: Provide a community wiki-like message system, where readers + providers suggest the blog post. You review them, add your own minor changes and make the final post.
I think we’re discussing this a couple of comments up.
Ahh man 20 bucks says this will null 99% of the monthly deadpools…..
thanks for realizing it’s gotten a lil outta control… this site is the shit.
well done lea!
since i am worry about too many really-really-really real low end offers here lately! :D
Thanks everyone for the comments — I thought I was venting of too much work and you guys managed to give me even more! :) I will see how this site evolves this year.
Patrick has a very nice and practical idea there. Guest writers would be a wonderful idea and would add a lot of good usable content to the site.
@LEA,
What about the idea of paid posts? I would be more then happy to send you a few bucks to post my ad/post/offer.
Thanks,
Anthony
Is there a way to search for hosts by certain criteria?
“How can I have any confident that you will finish year 2, when you are still stuck in year 1?”
I have always wondered why these providers register their domains for 1 year? Why not 10 years? Are they not going to be around in 10 years? Don’t even they have faith in their futures? Are they going to hit and run? Even google gives more importance to domains registered for 10 years (ref: google patent).
I’d be glad to (even though I am not a VPS provider), but in some TLDs it is not possible to pay upfront for more than 1 year, for example in .ru.
I have owned about 20 domains (I am not a VPS provider either) but I have lost all the domains that I registered for 1 year. For some reason or the other like being too lazy to renew, or thinking that domain is not worth keeping or I want a better name or some excuse or the other. But domains that I registered for 10 years (or 5 years for cc TLDs) I manage to find some use or the other so they are still with me. After 5/10 years I sort of get attached to the domain name and renew it further at least for old times sake.
Now I find it hard to trust any provider that has not registered their domain for 10 years, but its ok if the domain is only 1 or 2 years old so far (but not less than 1 year).
By the way LEA thanks for the great site. Keep up the great work, its appreciated.