This year we are going to take a fresh approach to Low End Box to help make sure we are providing interesting and useful content to our community and readers. To help get us started we need to hear from you!
What sort of content do you want to see from Low End Box in 2020 and beyond? What would make you want to keep coming to the website? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments. Don’t hold back, we are looking for honesty above all else. We promise to listen.
Thanks for taking the time to help make Low End Box better.
Jon Biloh is the owner and operator of LowEndBox and LowEndTalk, two of the most recognized platforms in the global web hosting and infrastructure community. With nearly two decades of experience in the IT industry, Jon has spent his career building, growing, and acquiring internet infrastructure companies, with a focus on affordability, transparency, and performance.
Before acquiring LowEndBox and LowEndTalk, Jon was involved in founding and scaling several hosting-related ventures, from bare-metal data center operations to high-volume cloud platforms. His hands-on understanding of both the business and technical sides of infrastructure has shaped his approach to community building and editorial strategy.
Today, Jon’s mission is to modernize and expand the LowEnd ecosystem while staying true to its roots: serving developers, small businesses, and independent providers who value control, value, and community. Under his leadership, LowEndBox is evolving into more than just a deals site, it’s becoming a resource hub, media platform, and discovery engine for DIY hosting enthusiasts and indie cloud providers.
When he’s not working on platform improvements, Jon can be found engaging with users on LowEndTalk (@jbiloh), collaborating with providers, and exploring new ways to support the next generation of internet builders.
more reliable offers…I have signed up for 3 providers the last year and paid yearly only to see them close 3-6 montsh after and lose my money.
We’re working to focus on providers with longer positive track records rather than so many startups.
More low-end dedicated servers
What types of servers, budgets and locations interest you most?
Cut out Colocrossing resellers
Hi Jon,
You, Frank and LET / LEB teammates are doing a great job and pleasant to see that you are asking end users as well as providers feedback to improve the communities.
Kind regards,
– Mitesh
Thanks for the compliments!
Hi Jon,
Please check nested comments are still not fixed.
Kind regards,
– Mitesh
HostNamaste
Should be fixed now, hopefully for good. It was a bug caused by a plugin that stopped it from working.
Hoping to see two things. One, more options in non-US locations. Secondly, more promotions from established providers, even if their offerrings are more expensive. Along with the offerings, provide some info about their track record. Over the years, I ordered 4 VPSs here. But one ordered last year went out of business.
We are working with larger providers to submit exclusive deals for Low End Box. Great suggestion, thank you!
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Nested comments are not working LOL
They are working now. A bug with a YoastSEO plugin was causing them not to work.
More Australian/New Zealand options
The price point is hard to achieve in AU/NZ but we are working on this.
Jon, when can you apply these feedbacks or you are just asking and asking!
Lots has already been implemented and more to come. If you scroll down towards the end of the comments you can see the big list of changes already completed.
Deeper/stricter vetting of hosts before posting they’re offers/promos. So we can try to avoid situations like what happened with kudo hosting.
We are actively working with the Low End Talk community to better vet hosts published on LEB. This is a work in progress.
Hi Guys,
Thanks again for the feedback! We are taking notes.
On the nested comment issue, it seems to work with Chrome all the time. Firefox it does not work as well in my experience. What are you guys seeing?
I would like to see offers on:
1. Directadmin/cPanel/other Panel shared/reseller hosting
2. VPS for game servers
3. Hosts accepting bitcoins apart from Paypal
4. Local hosting companies from Asian and European markets (Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Japan, Korea, Norway, Luxembourg, etc.)
Also, the web hosts should be minimum 1 year old and registered business if they want to post dirt-cheap deals like for example $10/yr 500GB reseller plan!
We have a great Sydney and Singapore offer coming tomorrow.
Thanks for the excellent feedback, we will work on these suggestions.
Please . NO MORE colocrossing none for 1 year will be good
Make evidence of no more scams.
No confidence in buying now.
i never see here, offers from latin america, and africa. search for prices in countrys how arg or south africa and put here.
Thanks for the feedback Julio, we will keep an eye on what we can do for those regions.
On a separate topic, does anyone have an idea why the inline comments are not working?
How about more low end dedicated servers?
We actually just featured Server Mania, you should check them out at https://lowendbox.com/blog/server-mania-leb-exclusive-e3-1240v3-dedicated-servers-starting-at-39-mo/ — great deal on E3 servers.
-Better tracking of how many of any of the services or discounts exist and/or are available.
-Eliminate or archive old posts with discontinued offers
-Better layout – comparisons of specs for active, verified offers for instance
Thanks for the additional feedback everyone.
I am still trying to fix the nested comment issue. Has anyone seen this issue before?
Yes Jon, I have seen the problems with nested comments from WordPress and mostly happens related to custom themes. Please discuss with the LEB’s WP Theme developer to fix it.
Nested comments are fixed, it was an issue with YoastSEO.
Hello Everyone,
The work continues to improve our community and the websites behind it. I wanted to provide a review of what we’ve done the last two weeks along with what is coming the next couple of weeks:
Completed in the past two weeks as of 2/13/2020:
1. New hosting platform setup entirely on virtualized resources at numerous hosting providers.
2. CloudFlare setup and migrated for both LEB and LET
3. Low End Box WP and plugins all updated.
4. Low End Box moved to new hosting platform
5. Low End Talk environment prepared on new hosting platform, migration scheduled for 2/16/2020 — Updated, this was completed as scheduled tonight!
6. Low End Talk plugins updated
7. Low End Talk email fixed and SSL fixed
8. Low End Talk registration fixed
9. New writer hired (and discussed rules with her so mistakes happen less often)
10. Hired community member Northern (on discord) to write 4 tutorials per month
11. Discussed future of LEB and LET and my commitment to making our community better with @trewq at length and discussed specific ideas we could implement. Started the same conversation with the balance of the moderation team.
12. Fixed the LET help desk (which we’ll officially start using shortly, pending convo with the mods)
13. Got on Discord so I am readily available to anyone who needs me
14. Updated and cleaned up the LEB help desk
15. Removed all references to Deluxe and ColoCrossing
16. Removed all static banner ads
17. Reduced the amount of ad positions available through BSA to increase the value to our advertisers
18. Shuffled some content positioning to make LEB and LET a little cleaner
19. Updated some of the old LEB content pages to make things more consistent and uniform.
20. Answered a whole lot of questions on LET and Discord
21. Posted this thread on LET and a thread on LEB asking for feedback
22. Gained access to all social platforms and posted on Facebook for the first time
Additional Items Completed as of 2/21/2020:
1. Low End Box email subscriber form on the main page is fixed. It will now send you a confirmation email upon joining and then send you notices each time a new offer is submitted.
2. A second Low End Box tutorial writer from our community has been hired to provide paid content.
3. A social integration has been completed for Low End Box so that posts are automatically pushed to Facebook
4. A voting system to allow users to rate offers has been added to Low End Box
5. Prep and testing is underway to update Low End Talk’s vanilla installation, which is scheduled for next weekend.
6. Work continues to troubleshoot why nested comments are not working on Low End Box… working theory is it’s CloudFlare related
7. Low End Box and Low End Talk email are now sending via Amazon SES
8. The Low End Talk helpdesk has been cleared down of all old tickets and all new tickets have been replied to, or nearly all. Thanks to our mod team for their great work there.
9. The Low End Talk helpdesk now properly sends email confirmations upon ticket submissions to the end user
10. The Low End Box helpdesk has been cleared down and all old tickets replied to and closed. We’ve received a lot of new offers recently so we’re going to be working to get those written up the next few weeks
11. More work has been done to clean up the back ends and remove old static ads from HVH, ChicagoVPS and ColoCrossing
12. We’ve been making changes to Low End Box offers that do not conform to our rules or have other issues (thank you community for pointing these things out).
13. We are investigating a bug with the mobile LET theme
14. We are monitoring the loads on the new hosting platform and making changes as needed to make sure the websites stay super fast and stable.
In addition to all of that we are still working to make a bunch of other changes as previously described. More is on the way.
A lot of positive movement, love it! Good work Jon and team.
Thanks Dustin, we are working hard to improve things.
Email notification of offers, filtered by tag.
Please signup to our “Newsletter” on the right hand side of LEB and you’ll be notified by email of new offers. 🙂
I did that, but there’s no feedback that the entered email address has been accepted, should there be?
If not, then there’s another suggestion for you. 😉
In any case, I appear not to be receiving notifications.
Did you get an email asking you to confirm the email submission?
Nope.
Minor request: On the right side of the main page, there is a small panel with “Latest Comments”. Is there a way to extend the number of entries? Two suggestions, click to another page with a longer list of the latest comments, or make the main page list expandable/collapsible with more comments. Sometimes I want to see what the latest comments are but more than 5 have been posted by the time I check the site, and then it takes some clicking through and scrolling through several of the recent posts… Just an idea, or maybe there’s already a way to view these that I just don’t know about?
Otherwise, my main suggestions for the site have already been expressed above (e.g. more low end dedicated server offers, cheap but legit KVM offers in the $20-$30/year range or less, cheap KVM storage offers, more research to help avoid people/companies that run away with people’s money or offer bad services, etc.)
It’s difficult to maintain a site that caters to everyone, as we all have different requirements and preferences, but over the years, this site (along with LET) has helped me to find providers that mostly match what I’m looking for, and has helped to avoid a lot of headaches. I’d guess that everyone who has purchased from an offer featured here has probably at one time or another been duped, it’s happened to a lot of us. It’s difficult to avoid this, and there is risk in every provider we sign up with, and everyone’s experience here helps to make this site a great resource. I appreciate everyone’s contribution to making this site what it is, from the people behind the site, like Jon Biloh, and whoever else is behind the site, to everyone who takes the time to report back their experiences.
I am glad that you’ve enjoyed the time you’ve spent on Low End Box and Low End Talk! Thanks for being part of our community. We are working hard to make things even better and plenty of our changes should already be obvious from the past 60 days. I really like your suggestion about the comments — I will look into that right away. Thanks again for being part of our community.
Ask and you shall receive, it’s now the last 8 comments. Working on something better for a long term solution, too.
Thank you for the modification, looks better already. I thought 5 was too few, but 15-20 would be far too many (to be showing up in a sidebar like that), so hopefully a long term solution can be found that will be useful for those of us who benefit from the “Latest Comments” feature. And I have been noticing a number of improvements to the site all around, glad to see this! Thanks again for your work.
I just installed a plugin that allows you to subscribe to comments for each post. So I think that’s a nice addition too. Test it out and let me know what you think.
Not subscribed to the email list, but it looks like eight in the sidebar might be fine for now, thanks!
The follow-up comment feature that you added might be more useful for providers who want to know what people are saying about their listings, or if someone is interested in following specific providers, but it would be too many emails for me to get comments on various or all of the providers’ listings. Much easier to just quickly glance at the Latest Comments to see what people are saying about random listings that I may or may not be interested in following via email.
Another minor observation is that when clicking on the latest comment link, it used to take you directly to the comment on the page with the “#”, but perhaps the nested comments have thrown that off a bit? Not sure. For now, I just have to scroll around, or search by date for whatever comment would be the most recent. Not a major inconvenience, just something that people who use, or click on the “Latest Comments” links might have noticed.
I am noticing that too, but unfortunately this is something that is likely beyond my level of development expertise. I am going to have to try to find someone who can help troubleshoot that issue. I was playing with it a few days ago but didn’t have any luck.
I have been cleaning up the back end, plugins, modules, etc, but haven’t been able to get that issue fixed yet.
Oh, also, no offense, but I second a ban (or limitation) on ColoCrossing-related offers. I’ve had bad experiences with more than one of these, the worst was with a company that was run by someone currently working at ColoCrossing. There have been so many people complaining about ColoCrossing that it might do the community better to take a break from them for a while. The potential for conflicts of interest can also cause credibility problems in the long run.
There have been very few offers hosted by ColoCrossing in the past 60 days on Low End Box. We are working on really diversifying the offers. 🙂
First of all, I would like to thank you. Thanks to you guys, I found what I would say is probably one of the best deals I have ever found- $50/year for a 5GB KVM VPS. It has worked great for my game server, however now i have more players and am considering upgrading to a dedicated server. I would love to see more dedicated servers at low prices! Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the suggestion, we have more dedicated server offers on the way over the next month.
More reputable providers. Enough less reputable provider.
Thanks for the suggestion. We are working with more providers who are larger to submit offers.
Just an FYI we have fixed a minor bug with the comment subscriptions system on posts — everything is working nicely now. Enjoy 🙂