I was so excited a few days ago to see a great offer from Interserver posted over at Low End Talk!

Haha, in my excitement, I read too fast! I skipped important words in the offer! Those important words just didn’t register in my mind!

From the offer’s title — **-$40 Account Credit (FREE)- **
— it looked like Interserver was giving a free $40 account credit to any customer who posted his client ID in the offer thread!

Forty dollars is 💰 a lot 💰 here on the Low End!

But it wasn’t just the $40 that excited me. Seeing the Interserver post brought back tons of happy memories from when I myself had been an Interserver customer years ago!

Back then Interserver had an “unlimited everything” shared hosting offer. What was really special, though, was that, after some polite discussion, Interserver allowed me ssh access to the host node plus also access to the compilers!

The ssh access turned out to be a lot of trouble, because, somehow, I just couldn’t get key based authentication working on my end. Interserver support was super helpful, but, despite our joint efforts, I ended up sticking with password authentication. Haha, the days of password authentication being “less desirable but okay” probably are gone now.

As I mentioned, besides ssh access, I also needed a compiler. I was using a small command line encryption program which had to be compiled on the server before it could be used there.

Interserver set up a special compiler user group on the server. Then they made my account a member of that group so that compiler access could work for me.

The take away from all this is that Interserver listened to what I needed and did everything they possibly could do to help me! They even changed their server’s user group configuration just for me!

Honestly, I have no idea how anybody in the whole world could expect more from a shared hosting provider than what Interserver gave me. And all for a dirt cheap Low End Price!

I remained an Interserver shared hosting customer for quite some time. Eventually, however, I got nudged away from shared hosting toward cheap dedicated servers. Exactly how that nudge happened was amazing! Maybe there might be another fun story coming soon. 🔜

Please remember that these days shared hosting often doesn’t include ssh access, and if ssh access is included, key based authentication might be required. Also, it might be very rare these days that compiler access would be allowed on a shared server.

So now that you have seen why I love Interserver — because they were so wonderfully nice to me — let’s return to the recent Interserver offer post on Low End Talk.

Too excited to have paid enough attention to the precise wording of the offer, I logged in at Interserver. I was surprised to see my account still there! I grabbed my client ID, and posted to the offer thread:

Haha, after I posted I finally read the offer carefully. Uh oh! I completely missed both the “new customer” and “100 uses” restrictions. Realizing I did not qualify for the offer, I went and posted again, hoping at least to prevent others from making the same mistake as I did.

What happened next?

@interservermike extended the credit to me anyway, despite that I did not qualify:

I haven’t talked with Mike and John for years. They won’t see this article until it’s published. I don’t think they know that, as of this writing, I’m a new Contributor here at Low End Box.

On the other hand, I guess I got a $40 credit, didn’t I? This site is an advertising platform for hosting, isn’t it?

So, I do understand if a few of you feel skeptical when I say:

Interserver took really good care of me back when I was their customer!

Here’s a screenshot of my $40 account credit:

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Not_Oles

Contributor at Low End Box

It seems only a moment since the day, fifty years ago, when I stood in a doorway watching yard after yard of printed paper full of ascii art scrolling out of a Teletype 33 surrounded by a bunch of laughing guys!

My Low End Adventures started here at LowEndBox, when just a few years back, I found the perfect deal on a dedicated server from OVH!

These days I own my own gorgeous antique server named Darkstar. She is colocated in Dallas, Texas USA at LevelOneServers.com.

Besides writing for LowEndBox, helping as a moderator at LowEndTalk and running Darkstar, I'm trying to learn a little about programming and networking.

All these years, and, still, so much more to learn! So many people here who can teach me!

It's very, very fun here on the Low End, isn't it? :)

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