amuck-landowner

Since WHT isn't the same as 5+ years ago, where's all the 'good' traffic gone to?

ItsChrisG

New Member
Verified Provider
A lot of providers say and know (at least the ones that are run by people who have been in the industry for ~10 years, so they have a frame of reference, that WHT is no longer what it was starting about 5~ years ago. 5+ years ago WHT was full of "better" traffic/client types, now its been overrun with crap both in terms of providers and the client type and overall traffic surfing the forum.

So, where did all the rest of the good traffic go? As far as I know, there is still no other board that can be compared to WHT - but I have to assume that the traffic went SOMEWHERE. Good clients didnt all of a sudden stop searching for the types of stuff they were 5+ years ago.

Where do you guys think it went, or what do you think they are doing now?
 

DomainBop

Dormant VPSB Pathogen
I have to assume that the traffic went SOMEWHERE. Good clients didnt all of a sudden stop searching for the types of stuff they were 5+ years ago.
Maybe the good clients went to companies that don't advertise or participate on WHT (or hosting forums in general).  The bulk of my monthly hosting bills go to providers who aren't active on WHT, and off the bat I can think of dozens of major industry players who don't have any active representatives on WHT: AWS, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, Peer1, OVH, etc.

The decline of forums and rise of social media probably played a "minor" role in WHT's traffic decline and changing demographics too

5+ years ago WHT was full of "better" traffic/client types
If I had any services with you I'd be lawyering up and suing you AND filing a PayPal dispute as a result of that statement about the declining quality of clients. :p

Addressing the decline in quality of clients not as a host but as someone who runs an Internet business that has been around (a few months) longer than Google: declining quality of clients isn't limited to the hosting industry.  If you were to plot a graph of "Internet penetration" vs "client quality" over the past 20 years I'm sure you would find there is an inverse relationship between the two.
 
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Chatahooch

New Member
Social + blogs = Different places and outlets for that traffic. WHT is no longer the "catch all" it was.
 

Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
I think you're missing the big one - hosts paying for people to host with them. Digital Ocean, Vultr, Azure, Dell, Rackspace, OVH, Linode, etc, all more or less pay you to be their client with upfront credits with a small initial deposit.

What WHT is left with is a lot of people that have run out of credit with any of those, can't signup due to GEO restrictions, or are too cheap to put the $5 deposit in.

There's still good clients in WHT it's just there's everyone and their dog undercutting each other to get them.

I did a breakdown on WHT the other day where in a given day, non premium/corporate users always had at least as many posts as corporate's if not more. Many/most of the normal's had JUST enough to get into the ad section and maybe comment on a thread if their name comes up.

The place is just a selling floor which is fine, but Corporate's are getting the raw end since many of the corporate's have a LOT of posts in there, helping bring a lot of decent content (along side a lot of 'please check the offers section' posts).

Francisco
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
I think a lot of folks miss the economic reality of the past 10 years.  You folks probably have blindness based on well to do locality you reside in.

Lots of people are out of tokens to play life.   Out of spare cash for non essentials.

Middle class (and not just in the US) has been beat down.   Income plummeted, and there is high unemployment contrary to the selective revised counting that unemployment numbers say.  I know many people who use to earn a good living who now would likely be thrilled to find fulltime at minimum-like-wage.  It's fairly brutal.

On top of that,  there is what happened with the rise of Facebook.   Facebook killed a lot of traffic to forums.   People like the lazy garbage yard of everything in one site/place.   Backlash against Facebook and people bailing out, hasn't happened quite enough yet to reverse that. It's happening, but not fast or large enough.

Other big factor, hosting things yourself was more of a necessity years back.  Today there are 100 different companies with a solution for everything.  Be it simplified web tools for your blog (Wordpress hosted) or easy site creation (Wix).  Lots of these and for nearly every niche. 

What is left of a generic market where people are buying raw resources where they must have the know how to pull all that together for their solution, maintain it, secure it, create the content for it?   Well, it's greatly reduced.  How much?  I can't really say.  

At this point in time if you are throwing ads / offers at sites solely as your means of awareness and sales, you are going to have a very hard time.  Exception is those silly low price giveaways, but they too have a finite market cap.  You will deal with mass abuse, fraud, etc. with that stuff and with no real margins, pure scale formula.

Even if you have a well thought out approach with people to manage your awareness / marketing / sales / etc.  it's still very hard and active revision approach until niche is found and traction gets going.
 
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GIANT_CRAB

New Member
What WHT needs is a lot more drama. I mean, just look at LET. LET don't randomly ban people for speculation and drama whilst WHT try to keep drama to the minimal and just randomly bans people. LET traffic is still kind of thriving because of DRAMA. 

Basically, WHT is now know as the "have you tried checking the offers section" place. Even when you ask for help, they'll give very brief answers or nonsense just to advertise their signature. Vpsboard on the other hand, has people that really wants to help you.
 
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mprice

New Member
The 'devops' term didn't even exist in the heyday of WHT.   there is a whole 'devops' industry, job title and various discussion boards to replace what used to be systems administration technical stuff that was discussed on WHT.  Most developers don't need or want the traditional type hosting products discussed on WHT, when you have the likes of Heroku, AWS, etc.  Website owners who are not developers now have many other alternatives for getting web hosting, with sitebuilder-type products bundled with their GoDaddy domain name, or Squarespace, Wix, etc.  
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
What WHT needs is a lot more drama. I mean, just look at LET. LET don't randomly ban people for speculation and drama whilst WHT try to keep drama to the minimal and just randomly bans people. LET traffic is still kind of thriving because of DRAMA. 

Basically, WHT is now know as the "have you tried checking the offers section" place. Even when you ask for help, they'll give very brief answers or nonsense just to advertise their signature. Vpsboard on the other hand, has people that really wants to help you.
LET has drama?  I thought they wanted no more of that :)  It does generate interest and there is no arguing that.  Problem is how to have drama along with healthy portion of good constructive.   Balance thing.

As far as LET thriving, well, it has seen its peak.  Arguably its time is passing.  Nearly everything fades, eventually.  Although cheap has a longer lure on folks.

WHT I don't visit much.  The random bans are infamous and I swear every other providers has prior bans there.   I find WHT to be incomplete and counter productive.   There is like with other sites, and this one included no correlation of information to folks posting ads.   You can go rm -rf servers, insult your customers, rip people off, then next week go post a WHT offer.  The first person that steps up and complains on your offer gets yanked with some moderation points.   It SUCKS.

I'd like to see WHT minus the Offers :)  I wonder how that would go over, just a month or three.

All of these sites bring little to the table to tie things together.   The forums use for such is incredibly yucky.
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
The 'devops' term didn't even exist in the heyday of WHT.   there is a whole 'devops' industry, job title and various discussion boards to replace what used to be systems administration technical stuff that was discussed on WHT.  Most developers don't need or want the traditional type hosting products discussed on WHT, when you have the likes of Heroku, AWS, etc.  Website owners who are not developers now have many other alternatives for getting web hosting, with sitebuilder-type products bundled with their GoDaddy domain name, or Squarespace, Wix, etc.  
I agree with this.  However stuff like Heroku and AWS aren't real affordable usually.  Those along with Google explain just a bit of the defection to Cloud-like stuff outside of WHT.

Just look at Heroku's support pricing:


  • Standard Support

    Business Hour Support 1

    1+ Day Response Times

    Free

  • Premium Support

    24/7 Support

    1-hour Response SLA

    Starting at $1,000/month 2

  • Technical Account Manager

    Includes Premium Support

    Dedicated Technical Consulting

    Starting at $2,000/month 3
 
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Francisco

Company Lube
Verified Provider
I'd like to see WHT minus the Offers :)  I wonder how that would go over, just a month or three.

All of these sites bring little to the table to tie things together.   The forums use for such is incredibly yucky.
I proposed turning off signatures in the discussion sections just to see what would happen but no one in administration wants to deal with the obvious fallout of that all.

Francisco
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
I proposed turning off signatures in the discussion sections just to see what would happen but no one in administration wants to deal with the obvious fallout of that all.
I turn sigs off all over town....  Downside is data isn't there to make it clear at times who is what company.  Been known to turn sigs back on for a few days, get tired of what I see then turn it back off.  

Sigs mattered more when whole backlinks count was a bigger signal in search placement.  Now most of these forums software solutions are Nofollow links anyways, so less useful for that.   Another reason why fewer quality folks are showing up on forums.
 

Chatahooch

New Member
Serious clients are using real cloud solutions that are offered by Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace. 
I have tried 2 of those big 3. Namely Rackspace and Amazon and the performance was quite simply atrocious. Serious clients look beyond the brand name and go for another solution that leaves these guys in the dust in many different ways.
 

gordonrp

New Member
Verified Provider
Simply, the medium sized business type client that would previously pay $400/mo to host their Windows server for their office email is now using hosted/cloud solutions. The medium sized business clientele has definitely dried up a bit on WHT, no doubt.
 

wlanboy

Content Contributer
Nice topic about the decline of traditional expert forums - and traditional services.

On my daily business I see a closing gap between developers and administrators. And a closing gap between bare bone providers and service providers.

Starting with devops.

The Agile Manifesto and the DevOps story did a big bang on the way systems are developed and deployed. Even Microsoft did get that bang and moved their Azure service from "VMWare to the clouds" to a real SaaS environment.

Things like that make administrators unnecessary for most traditional jobs. They do have time for new jobs like redudancy, performance tests, penetration tests, monitoring, scaling. But they won't install servers or databases any longer. They tune them, they monitor them but they don't get paid to click on the next buttons.

Same change for developers. They don't re-event wheels but connect complex system. All about interfaces, dtos, transactions, transformations, sessions and plugin customizing. You don't start from scratch. There are systems running on the client side and you have to integrate any new solution into the allready working environment.

It is about speed too and about certifications. Project times getting shorter. Their focus changing into deep hassle-less integration. More plugins and less custom workaroud-ish code.

Pay-as-you-go SaaS is the elevator for automatic system deployments, automatic data transformation and plugin chains for integrated workflows. They need a CRM two days a week and a campain management two days a month. And they are only paying the days they are using the systems. No time and no money left to install and configure dedicated servers. No time and money to install a CRM per user. 

Braking it down to one simple requirement: They don't care about servers or software. They want a running service.

You don't build your own nuclear power plant any longer to have light at noon. You just buy the power you need. And you only pay what you use.

Departments in midsize and big corps do the same. They skip the servers, administrators, developers and just rent a CRM system or an exchange server.

They still need highly skilled administrators and developers to customize and monitor that stuff but they don't need them to run the stuff.

And even if you have to pay $50 per account per month it is cheaper. Much cheaper than 5 people costing around $15.000 per month.

Comparing wages to Rackspace, Azure, AWS prices .. hell you get a lot for $15.000 per month from them.

So selling services is much more profit-yielding than just selling servers or software.

Looking to my own habbits I am still old school and nostalgic.

E.g. I am running my own mail servers.

Paying for vps and paying for my time handling them. Second one is something that I should stop. If I think about how much money I can earn doing something for my job comparing to the time of handling the vps, the operating system, postfix, dovecot, upgrades, ...

It is my hobby. It is a good feeling to have full controll. But it is lost time doing things that someone else can handle by tools fully automated.

$40 per year for a vps or $40 per year for a fully managed exchange account.

That is the reason why I do feel nostalgic. Because it is like someone constructing his own car instead of renting one three days a month - when he really needs it.
 
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