Well I guess I'm poppin' the proverbial cherry on this sub-forum, and in doing so wanted to share a bit of observations and also express my enthusiasm for the remergence (is that a word?), of vpsBoard, as a valuable asset in our toolchests for keeping a pulse on the community, the industry, and a place for providers to come together and give each other a leg up.
Hopefully, this will continue to remain one of the hallmarks of vpsBoard - it was always a helpful and friendly place, and I often came to just browse and read up on what someone was doing or see if there was some way that I could help out.
So, congrats on being the phoenix rising from the ashes!
On another note, I took some time to go through some of my old forum posts and those made by others in those threads, as well as many of the PMs that were among the dusty bins of my inbox here...
Whereas it was a nice little time capsule to reminisce and recall some of the good people that I had the opportunity to interface with, checking up on some of those links in their sigs revealed that "So many... have come and gone".
And that, I find, is somewhat saddening, personally. There's a lot of turnover in any business sector yet I couldn't help but wonder about the customers who had machines hosted with many of the companies whose domains are now either up for registration in the pool of available domain names or being offered up for sale.
Back when vpsBoard first got off the ground and focussed more on the providers in an area of the industry that WHT and LEB didn't really address directly, there were many fresh startups that were optimistic about the potential of offering virtualization services to customers. But now? many have completely vanished, and again, I wonder what became of their customer base.
I've seen a lot of threads over at LEB over the years lamenting providers whose operations simply ceased and their web presence and telephone numbers just stopped working. I myself tried out one provider (out of Hawaii, IIRC), that came on like gangbusters and marketed ridiculously nominal rates for annual subscriptions.
That particular provider (w2interactive.net), started exhibiting issues in stability and although I only used the little box I had with them for distro testing and such, it still perturbed me that such a thing could occur. At first it seemed as if they were really trying to address those issues, and then, poof! Gone, lolz.
This could happen to any customer, and is a reason that many companies simply won't consider anyone but an Amazon or Softlayer or Linode, etc., when it comes to choosing a provider.
In our case, there have been ups and there have been downs, but one thing that has kept us going for the long haul since 1985 is a focus on diversification in service offerings. At one time we were one of the very first four consumer targetted ISPs in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, and a grey/white box computer store operating out of a storefront in Redondo beach. The early nineties found retail brick and mortars suffering in Q2 of 92 I think, and then at Comdex that year, Q3 made the pages of many newspapers because the big boys like IBM, Compaq, and even others like Dell were suffering from lack of sales, with sea containers piling up in the ports because no one was making wholesale purchases - we had too much inventory rapidly becoming obsolete and had to dump, refocus, and shift back to service instead of retail sales of hardware - hosting BBS systems for hobbiests, adding value to our hardware in the form of Personal Internet stations running our own home spun Linux distro where all the customer had to do was unbox it, plug it into a phone jack, and voila! a 24/7 nailed up SLIP connection making them a node on the Net with a static IP issued to them by US.
The face of technology changes, and although I can't say that vpsBoard had reached any sort of logical end when it originally ceased operations, I can appreciate the notion that current management wishes to expand upon the focus of the mission here - not just related to VPSes.
And that makes sense. This was never really a great place to put out offers for VPSes when almost everyone seeing those offers were fellow service providers lol.
I would hope, that on one or more of the other subboards here that we could, as a community, engage in some sort of proactive discussions about what can be done when a provider knows that their cloud operations are going to be going bye bye - the very worst thing for EVERYONE in this community would be for some kind of stigma against small businesses offering virtual machines to the public are mostly inclined to just vanish, leaving their customers without any of their intellectual property.
For starters, perhaps we could have a forum where providers could discuss the migration of such customers long before a provider shutters their doors, and hopefully, as a community, we could assist in staving off blemishes from dozens or hundreds of customers suddenly waking up to find that their mission critical assets have vanished overnight, leaving a veritable train wreck for the rest of us to clean up.
Thanks to the new management, and the founder (manndude) of vpsBoard for this resource, and I would love to hear back on some of the points I raised in suggesting that this forum serve as a collective of providers actually protecting the industry together.
Your thoughts? Suggestions?
Kindest regards,
Hopefully, this will continue to remain one of the hallmarks of vpsBoard - it was always a helpful and friendly place, and I often came to just browse and read up on what someone was doing or see if there was some way that I could help out.
So, congrats on being the phoenix rising from the ashes!
On another note, I took some time to go through some of my old forum posts and those made by others in those threads, as well as many of the PMs that were among the dusty bins of my inbox here...
Whereas it was a nice little time capsule to reminisce and recall some of the good people that I had the opportunity to interface with, checking up on some of those links in their sigs revealed that "So many... have come and gone".
And that, I find, is somewhat saddening, personally. There's a lot of turnover in any business sector yet I couldn't help but wonder about the customers who had machines hosted with many of the companies whose domains are now either up for registration in the pool of available domain names or being offered up for sale.
Back when vpsBoard first got off the ground and focussed more on the providers in an area of the industry that WHT and LEB didn't really address directly, there were many fresh startups that were optimistic about the potential of offering virtualization services to customers. But now? many have completely vanished, and again, I wonder what became of their customer base.
I've seen a lot of threads over at LEB over the years lamenting providers whose operations simply ceased and their web presence and telephone numbers just stopped working. I myself tried out one provider (out of Hawaii, IIRC), that came on like gangbusters and marketed ridiculously nominal rates for annual subscriptions.
That particular provider (w2interactive.net), started exhibiting issues in stability and although I only used the little box I had with them for distro testing and such, it still perturbed me that such a thing could occur. At first it seemed as if they were really trying to address those issues, and then, poof! Gone, lolz.
This could happen to any customer, and is a reason that many companies simply won't consider anyone but an Amazon or Softlayer or Linode, etc., when it comes to choosing a provider.
In our case, there have been ups and there have been downs, but one thing that has kept us going for the long haul since 1985 is a focus on diversification in service offerings. At one time we were one of the very first four consumer targetted ISPs in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, and a grey/white box computer store operating out of a storefront in Redondo beach. The early nineties found retail brick and mortars suffering in Q2 of 92 I think, and then at Comdex that year, Q3 made the pages of many newspapers because the big boys like IBM, Compaq, and even others like Dell were suffering from lack of sales, with sea containers piling up in the ports because no one was making wholesale purchases - we had too much inventory rapidly becoming obsolete and had to dump, refocus, and shift back to service instead of retail sales of hardware - hosting BBS systems for hobbiests, adding value to our hardware in the form of Personal Internet stations running our own home spun Linux distro where all the customer had to do was unbox it, plug it into a phone jack, and voila! a 24/7 nailed up SLIP connection making them a node on the Net with a static IP issued to them by US.
The face of technology changes, and although I can't say that vpsBoard had reached any sort of logical end when it originally ceased operations, I can appreciate the notion that current management wishes to expand upon the focus of the mission here - not just related to VPSes.
And that makes sense. This was never really a great place to put out offers for VPSes when almost everyone seeing those offers were fellow service providers lol.
I would hope, that on one or more of the other subboards here that we could, as a community, engage in some sort of proactive discussions about what can be done when a provider knows that their cloud operations are going to be going bye bye - the very worst thing for EVERYONE in this community would be for some kind of stigma against small businesses offering virtual machines to the public are mostly inclined to just vanish, leaving their customers without any of their intellectual property.
For starters, perhaps we could have a forum where providers could discuss the migration of such customers long before a provider shutters their doors, and hopefully, as a community, we could assist in staving off blemishes from dozens or hundreds of customers suddenly waking up to find that their mission critical assets have vanished overnight, leaving a veritable train wreck for the rest of us to clean up.
Thanks to the new management, and the founder (manndude) of vpsBoard for this resource, and I would love to hear back on some of the points I raised in suggesting that this forum serve as a collective of providers actually protecting the industry together.
Your thoughts? Suggestions?
Kindest regards,
