# How do you feel ? 7 Limit gone



## darknessends (Jun 12, 2013)

Hi,

How are you guys feeling here selling your stuff ? Whats the response.

I feel at least it does not has the limit of 7 for every offer and it is now taking VPS industry back to providing quality service rather than fighting over who sells at minimum.

I appreciate Catalyst Host who actually are brave enough to take enough loss but serving to customers with quality. How about other people ? Are we having sales from here? 

I see now new kind of offers starting to post, people are brave enough to come up with genuine offerings.

Thanks, Anuj


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## BlueVM (Jun 12, 2013)

While we haven't posted an offer yet, we have purchased some lower end and higher end hardware in Buffalo in expectation that we can rent the machines out for a bit over $50 a month... (Dedicated)...

We've also debated opening up "low density nodes" which would consist of 20 or less customers...


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## bbb (Jun 12, 2013)

I'm worried that people will inflate their prices simply because they can. I'm willing to pay extra for quality, but I want to make sure that I'm actually getting my money's worth. A lot of LEB hosts are shit, and if they come over here offering 'better' plans for more money while they're still the same two-bit operation they always were, it's going to be very annoying. I think there needs to be more than just a _Verified Provider_ group. Perhaps a group for providers that have been around for more than a year and have proven to be quality members of the forum with decent contributions and actual, proper knowledge. People like KuJoe -- he knows his shit, but he's still (probably) going to be linked into the same group as some summerhost that passes the 'test'.


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## SeriesN (Jun 12, 2013)

bbb said:


> I'm worried that people will inflate their prices simply because they can. I'm willing to pay extra for quality, but I want to make sure that I'm actually getting my money's worth. A lot of LEB hosts are shit, and if they come over here offering 'better' plans for more money while they're still the same two-bit operation they always were, it's going to be very annoying. I think there needs to be more than just a _Verified Provider_ group. Perhaps a group for providers that have been around for more than a year and have proven to be quality members of the forum with decent contributions and actual, proper knowledge. People like KuJoe -- he knows his shit, but he's still (probably) going to be linked into the same group as some summerhost that passes the 'test'.


Ditto!

You can change the price but you can not easily change the attitude and service quality.

Then again, I can not imagine a day without a bowl of Cereal :"D


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## HalfEatenPie (Jun 12, 2013)

In my opinion, as beneficial the LowEndBox's rule of 7 dollar maximum was to many people financially, it definitely meant higher user capacity per node. 

Now, it depends on the company's business plan and server management style, but at Catalyst (thanks for the mention by the way!) we really wanted to push towards quality.  Speaking only financially, we can focus on lower capacity per node and more time investment our staff can focus on Catalyst instead of their other jobs (I believe Jarland has 4 jobs on top of Catalyst?).  We love what we do, but sometimes real life kicks in the front door.  

I mean take what I said with a grain of salt, this is just our own reasoning for our price elevation, obviously it changes from provider to provider.   People sometimes make mistakes and sometimes underestimates certain aspects and we just change it up and keep on moving.  Very few get it right the first time around (and most people remain silent about it), but the best we can do is make an educated decision from where we are now.  Just to make this clear, price elevation isn't a decision we made on a whim, it was discussed internally for a while before it was applied (and it did hit resistance here and there).  

And personally I dislike the continual fragmentation of the Provider group.  We're all reasonable enough to know what to avoid and what to get.  Why do you require more and more hand holding?  New members coming into the community?  Fantastic!  They can make their own decisions, stop poisoning the well.


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## NodeBytes (Jun 12, 2013)

I think it's kind of nice to not have a max of $7

I appreciate seeing offers from companies that provide services on nodes that aren't so overloaded and those that can provide dedicated resources. I also think it allows providers to expand into a higher end market by raising their prices to allow them to provide better services on better hardware than they could before. 

I'm sure there are/will be a few companies that raise their prices just cause they can and we will not get anything out if it, but that doesn't mean all of them will.

Call me crazy, but on occasion I don't use the coupon codes and I pay full price just because I like the company and what they do.


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## D. Strout (Jun 12, 2013)

I agree that the removal of the $7 limit is proving to be beneficial, but I feel like it was good that it was in place for a time. It set people's expectations, so providers still don't want to stray too far from it here. Now providers can compete amongst themselves, making it possible to charge more not strictly for resources, but for less quantifiable things like support and node un-fullness. Yet as I said, people still have expectations which if a provider doesn't meet, they'll avoid the provder. For instance, I wouldn't pay any more than $15/month for 512MB KVM. Providers charging more I feel are unreasonable, no matter what else they say they provide.

There was a fair amount of discussion on LET about how to get around this "offer as much quantity as you can for $7 while ignoring quality" issue. While it never would have occurred to me to suggest removing the limit entirely, that seems to be working here.


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## AlexBarakov (Jun 12, 2013)

It is a different forum - different rules apply 

LET has 7$ limit as it was intentionally for.. Real lowend VPS, not 5GB for 7$


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## MannDude (Jun 12, 2013)

I like it better this way. No limit on pricing or resources. You're free to continue to post $7 offers, of course. But you won't get flack for posting an $8/mo offer, either.

Obviously there is still a lot of the 'low end' market here with the flocking to vpsBoard after the LET/LEB incidents but this forum is for all things VPS, big ones, small ones. Cheap ones and expensive ones.


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## NodeBytes (Jun 12, 2013)

D. Strout said:


> Now providers can compete amongst themselves, making it possible to charge more not strictly for resources, but for less quantifiable things like support and node un-fullness.


Yes! I totally agree.


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## TheLinuxBug (Jun 12, 2013)

First, let me flash back some years and explain how we have reached this industry with VPS/VDS/Cloud services and what this industry was before virtualized services.  Before everyone started using virtualized services, most people were required either to spend a nice chunk of change on their own dedicated server, or use 'shell' accounts.  Commercial shell accounts were usually used for program development, higher speed downloading (in the time of dial-up modem, most shells had T1 (1.5Mbps) or faster connections, remote irc (bouncers, irc from terminal, etc), and hosting websites (Think public_html directory reached by host.com/~username). At the time, shells were the "OpenVZ" of today, except you operated without root privileges and used a shared ip address. If you are still asking your self, "what is a shell account?"  Well, this is like logging into your vps and adding a user account and selling said user account.  In the earlier days of the internet, collecting shell accounts was as trendy as VPS servers have become today.  In fact, the first time I used an OpenVZ  VPS, I was actually looking for just a shell account and ran into the virtualized services.  When I first came to LEB, it was about the time shell account providers started disappearing and these virtualized services were becoming more popular.  Still today I like to collect accounts as it has always been a hobby, but instead of just single user accounts, I have come to collect small vps servers from various providers. In this case, and with the case of shell accounts, to me it has always been about a low cost service I can use to test a network in a certain area, or vpn from, or run some type of bouncer when needed. For these types of things, most of the time I do not need more than 64-128mb of ram and only a small amount of resources. So for me, the attractiveness of the large memory options that have been coming out and the whole idea of large amounts of resources for 'less' falls on deaf ears with me as it is all completely overboard for my general use.  For me I am more likely to spend the small amount of money on the lowend vps that has enough resources to allow me to do these things, rather than spending upwards of even $7 for the extra resources.  So for me, the $7.00 limit was a plus as it allowed me to come by services that fit what I needed without spending a lot of money on it.

However, for others, this may completely different and by being able to get away from the necessity of a low price, I think this will help separate which services are *only* for the "shell users" like me and the groups which *can also provide a higher level of services*, more geared towards production use.   Some providers that are not quite there yet because they have limited them self to the lowend market, should be able to make it slightly more profitable here and by proxy more stable offers to serious commercial users by not having to follow the $7.00 limitation which is required by LEB/LET. My hope though, is that those who strive to get into the higher end market do not forget about us people who are still looking for true "Low End" services or their 'roots' where they started out in this industry.  As long as this doesn't become a place solely for higher end services, eliminating the low end market all together, I can see how not having a price limit can be more viable overall for both the providers and the customers. 

*TL;DR:*

Not having a limit and allowing other types of advertising here besides solely low end VPS can be a good thing, allowing providers to expand and for us to provide a place to find reputable providers for all the separate industries (Shared Hosting, VPS, Dedicated servers, etc). However, I just hope that in allowing this, that the providers do not forget about the 'Low End' users that still exist, that is, the people who do not need all the extra bells and whistles and just wish to have a small reliable server. Though overall it has become a race over at LEB/LET for most resources for the buck, I hope there are still providers out there that can appreciate that some of us from the "shell account" era and the like, really do not need all those extra resources and continue to provide "Low End" options.

my 2 cents.

Cheers!


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## maounique (Jun 12, 2013)

I dont think the 7$ limit ever been a problem for us.

Prometeus and Ipwerweb always had plans for much more than that, our dedis are selling for hundreds, we have close to 100/m VPS plans too.

Sure, on LEB/LET were posted only offers that were qualifying, but this never meant we lowered the price for said qualification. We did design a few to fit, though and some promotions were done also to fit, but the difference would have been minimal for regular pricing/promo anyway.

One thing we are moving away from is the really low specs VPSes because of the IP prices and because they generate an overhead that makes servers unable to cope with the load they could if the plans were just a bit larger.

Right now, 256-384 plans are the minimum we offer, we were late in the LEB market and dont have the tons of Ips required and found out OVZ does not scale so well with thousands of threads per big server.

When we thought we nailed it well with the E3s with SSD and 16-32 GB ram, there came the last patch for the privilege escalation vulnerability and we started to experience lock-ups and crashes 3 times more often than before even on the smaller servers. It may not be obvious if you only have 2-10 servers, but for 30+ you get one crash per week at least, it is more like one per 4-5 days now and used to be one for 3 weeks or so.

Not to mention the loopback bug which appeared after the patch and is affecting random servers, we dont even have enough data to report it as it is so random and only on 2 servers or so at a time.

Conclusion: the 7$ limit doesnt affect us as we can offer small and big plans fitting.

OVZ is too unstable for production servers as we see them.

IP prices in EU as well as better resources utilization and better stability require us to sell larger plans than 128, starting at 256.


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## wdq (Jun 12, 2013)

I have always seen LEB as a way for smaller companies to get their names out there and promote their services. Usually these providers don't have a lot of the features that bigger providers like Linode have (an example of this would be a custom control panel, the ability to use internal networking, and the ability to move between locations easily).

Because they don't have all of these features they really can't charge as much as the bigger companies and still get a lot of business since most consumers would just go with the bigger company with a more solid reputation. So the idea of LEB to me is that smaller providers can post their offers, and consumers can have a cheaper alternative to a place like Linode. LEB's maximum price really seemed to be a way to keep the bigger providers away making it more of an "indie" hosting forum when compared to a place like WHT. 

At first I really didn't want to see the $7 limit going away, but now that we are here a few weeks later I really don't mind it. vpsBoard still isn't as commercial as WHT, and it allows a much wider range of providers to post offers at the prices that they are able to sustain.

Some providers like LiquidHost and ChicagoVPS are still offering the usual LEB style promos where you can get 2GB or more for the usual $7 or less. 

Other providers like CatalystHost are able to offer incredibly stable and sustainable plans that are above the $7 limit. 

In the middle are providers like Hostigation, SecureDragon, and RamNode are offering a nice mix where they have much smaller plans as far as resources go (making them cheap as well as stable/sustainable) that are below $7. 

I'm not saying any provider is good or bad for being above $7, or under $7, or both. I'm saying that vpsBoard allows providers the opportunity to offer something that suits them best, and it allows for consumers the opportunity to choose something that suits them best.


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## drmike (Jun 12, 2013)

I am glad to see the artificial limit gone.  The $7 limit was set at a time when something like 512MB offer was rather large in resources.

As the unbelievable offers swelled in resources (or alleged resources) it became a joke. 

I can't really point to any industry with such a rapid pricing collapse where companies continue now for a year or two trying to offer 2GB packages now at $2-$3 a month.  There has been no self correction in pricing.  Just lots of lofty expectations.

I don't mind seeing low price offers on here.  I just cringe every time they are from the same folks and same network that has been causing the problems and ill perception.


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## jarland (Jun 12, 2013)

To be honest I never really felt restricted by the $7 limit on LEB/LET. I had an appreciation for the community and I saw an opportunity for mutual benefit. I know my server administration style and I knew that I had something to offer people. At the same time, Catalyst was lacking a solid direction. People may collect VPS, but they don't collect shared hosting accounts. The going rate on WHT was "I'll pay you $5 to use our hosting." So what I saw in LEB/LET for Catalyst was a very good way to spend a marketing budget and give back to a community that had given me quite a bit. Make no mistake that I want Catalyst to make a lot of money. A sustainable and growing business serves both it's staff and it's customers.

I intended to start our offerings as a LEB provider, as well as continue providing opportunities for these people, but I never intended to be limited by it in the long run. I made some mistakes along the way, but we've ironed out a great process for balancing price and quality. I yell at Ryan about the proposed price being too expensive, and he yells at me about undervaluing our product. We meet in the middle


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## Supicioso (Jun 12, 2013)

wdq said:


> I have always seen LEB as a way for smaller companies to get their names out there and promote their services. Usually these providers don't have a lot of the features that bigger providers like Linode have (an example of this would be a custom control panel, the ability to use internal networking, and the ability to move between locations easily).
> 
> Because they don't have all of these features they really can't charge as much as the bigger companies and still get a lot of business since most consumers would just go with the bigger company with a more solid reputation. So the idea of LEB to me is that smaller providers can post their offers, and consumers can have a cheaper alternative to a place like Linode. LEB's maximum price really seemed to be a way to keep the bigger providers away making it more of an "indie" hosting forum when compared to a place like WHT.
> 
> ...



As someone who's just starting to get into the deep end of the pool, I couldn't have explained it any better. Though places like Linode do charge considerably higher prices, their specs and support aren't always up to par, and when companies get that popular it's less about what they provide. Many-a-people have recommended Linode in the past, and I haven't seen the slightest reason to choose them over someone else. I'm probably one of the fewer people who pay more for the actual product and not the brand. (In a manner of speaking.)

But yeah. I do mostly agree, places like LEB and vpsBoard are good starting points for new businesses who don't have the massive amounts of start up cash to dump into advertisements and such. They can get a little notability and some customers with little to no risk, and that's the best thing to strive towards when starting a business. Low risk.

I've had bad experiences with support in the past, which is why I try to obtain personal relationships with all my customers. Things get done quicker, and smoother. At the end of the day. I think support is the most important thing.


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## HalfEatenPie (Jun 12, 2013)

jarland said:


> We meet in the middle


 

And then I yell at both of you guys just because I can.

Please don't fire me.  

In a non-joking way.  I love the way we're going.  vpsBoard is going in quite the splendid direction and I can't be happier with the community.  You guys rock!


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