WebHostingTalk Worst of the Hosting Industry
- Thread starter Dillybob
- Start date
I posted it there respectively with no ill-will. I just really want to warn hosts that are thinking of the benefits, they are worthless. I explained each individual benefit in my video and gave reasons why. The only one that is actually border-line worth some money is the post time from 3 days instead of 7. But, that's not even including sticky support which can range up to $1,000 / thread, not even including syndicate to twitter ($250), and bold title ($100). It's OUTRAGEOUS. This is not even included in the corporate package!
Tyler
Active Member
Agree entirely. Corporate membership is bogus, and many get it for free (Jon included).
I have issues with their moderation that go back 5 years. Hands down they have a problematic and entitled approach.
Didn't even know about that, that's just sad..
Tyler
Active Member
Just a little cross posting here. These sentiments and ill-will to WHT seems to be spreading, as of late
http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/web-hosting-reviews/39715-wht.html
Keep up the good work
Edit: Also worth reading:
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/36821/webhostingtalk-strange-administration
http://www.hostingdiscussion.com/web-hosting-reviews/39715-wht.html
Keep up the good work
Edit: Also worth reading:
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/36821/webhostingtalk-strange-administration
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Any proof of this behaviour?
Tyler
Active Member
He told me so via Skype, and he has gotten free membership for another account. There are other people on this forum who are beneficiaries of such.
Well, as we all know, 'his' word cannot be taken for anything more than what it is - bullshit.
Who else?
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drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
Corporate membership is legit (it exists and many people pay that crazy high $1800 annual amount) and it's overpriced vs. benefits and so called features.
As far as free corporate memberships.... Yes, there is some 'promotional code' floating and a bunch of guys have bought or got such from someone. Meaning either gratis from their supplier or small fee way less than that fat annual cost (like $100 tops vs. $1800 annual). Unsure where the code came from or why it exists. But WHT mods aren't trafficking in such and aren't handing it out.
WHT moderation + corporate Inet/Penton folks can scour accounts for payments and substantiate this surely.
have bought or got such from someone = PAYING middleman with code to go into WHT account, apply code and exit your account.
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Tyler
Active Member
I sent you a PM with the information requested. Like I said in the PM, I'm not in the business of naming and shaming, but hopefully that PM will help lend some credence to my claim.
drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
There are benefits to membership
? Sorry it's a bad commercial for what credit card .... AMEX had that slogan right?Special treatment is edgy part @MartinD. I see some rough housing at times (on WHT) and outwardly easy to misread things with mods know privileged info (as you certainly know).
If anything they have got slow to react and too much rope to left folks hang past few years.
I give it to @Dillybob for taking the time to put video together. Good work for a first go. I am waiting to see the sequel. We need a video tutorial
Howto make videos like this.Might be your turn, Tyler (Or MartinD), for a finishing ending blow sequel here.
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Tyler
Active Member
The "proof" is weak at best -- it's really just a list of accounts that I know for a fact have been beneficiaries of this "coupon code". It's really a matter of listening to some of the trusted souls here who can confirm this stuff / already did
Alright so this entire video is a hot potato and honestly shouldn't be touched with a 12 foot pole. I only watched through the first 10 minutes of it so if there's anything else to add on or clarified later then let me know.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and give my comments. Also just to cover my butt and making sure this isn't taken in any misunderstood way, this is my own opinion and does not represent policies or view of vpsB since I do enjoy participating in the community as well as being on staff helping out the community.
======================================================
My comments may or may not come off as a bit dickish. But it's just the opinions I get from the video.
======================================================
As a general rule of thumb, if you want to be taken seriously then don't curse in a video and show that you're pissed off. It more and more perpetrates that you have a bone to pick with them and might have other agendas involved.
1. You're expecting WHT to become a governing body of the Web Hosting industry through their Corporate Membership badge.
1.a. Surprisingly, WHT is not a governing body of the Web Hosting Industry.
1.a.i. This is how regular business works. It's just much more/easily seen because of the nature of the internet. Always as a rule of thumb you should probably do some background research on who you're buying from. The mechanic down the road from your house? Maybe he's known in the automotive industry as being a guy who acts all friendly but then screws you with fake problems if he thinks you're a sap. People will dislike him of course but if he decides to advertise his services on any car-service-forum/website and someone actually buys it without research, well then who should be to blame? What should be happening here is the individual realizing their mistake, learning a lesson, and moving on (because that's part of life). It's crappy when you get sucked into it but sometimes it's better to learn and go on living.
1.b. The expectations you're demanding has a different definition from one person to another. In order for your demand to work, this needs to be standardized. However, not everyone will be happy with it and will curse at you (the staff) regardless because they didn't get in due to "so and so" but "so and so already got in and already are successful with their own _".
1.b.i. The amount of manpower required to sift through those "Audits" and "application process" can be time consuming. People assume it's incredibly quick and easy since they can do it too from their armchair, however (due to the capacity I bet WHT gets) they'd have to hire a few people full-time to sift through the amount of "crap applications". Don't forget the amount of PMs and messages you get from other individuals who are also demanding your attention on this and that issue and "this person angered me because so and so and should be banned" or "this person said this about me and I find it uncalled for I want you to delete it and their account" (you'd be surprised...). In my opinion, it's simply asking for an increased workload from the WHT team.
1.c. You're expecting a privately held company whose bottom line is profits and not ethics to police their own income... Yeah... You see the giant meltdown on Reddit?
2. The general idea behind a free market is that prices change depending on what people are willing to pay. You may say "paying 1000 dollars to get my post stickied on WHT is bs!" but for some people (as you can obviously see), they do pay that (or get a reduced pricing through discounts or for free. However WHT values it at 1k USD and it seems to be pretty popular).
2.a. You're also ignoring the fact that running WHT surprisingly has costs. Whether it may be infrastructure costs, staffing costs, or advertising costs. I don't use WHT (I don't think I have an account there), however my assumptions are going to be that the only people who actually get paid are members of iNET Interactive and the community leaders. This of course depends on the back-end of WHT but with the amount of butthurt script kiddies or just people who sometimes decides to DDoS for fun in addition to the pretty large amount of traffic they get (currently 2349 concurrent users online), I'm going to bet their infrastructure costs and staffing costs are pretty high. Again, surprisingly not everyone works for third world country wages and if they do, well then you know you're going to get a half-baked terrible experience as you well know by GVH and Johnnyboy having his (younger? baby? I don't remember) sister do server migrations. Having talented people on staff costs a pretty penny and goes a long way.
2.b. If people are willing to pay for it, then good for them. I hope they actually get a return on the amount of money they spend.
3. Again surprisingly some people don't like Google. WHT is simply creating another service to increase the value of their Corporate Membership. If you use it, go for it. If you don't, whatever you can always just use Google Alerts as a good alternative. I'm guaranteeing you no-one immediately buys a corporate membership just for the keyword alerts. However, it might be a nice addition to have instead of going through Google or so and so services and dealing with that.
3.a. Also don't forget sometimes Google can take a while to crawl a site. Therefore a WHT Keyword Alert Tool could potentially notify you earlier than Google. If someone finds that more valuable (since a ton of people are afraid of "Google will Cache this and then my business will be ruined!!!") then it might be more worth it for them. You need to consider more than just your perspective. Again, I'm going to be coming off really dickish but this video is incredibly single-sided and there's no volume to it.
tldr: I dislike the GVH situation as much as the next person. I also find the Corporate Membership not worth it and also a completely waste of funds. However, I don't see any problem with WebHostingTalk trying to increase the value of their Corporate Member. From the customer's side, I wish there was a easy guide and information to keep people from purchasing services from obviously shoddy companies. However the unique nature of the internet and this industry and no formal system setup make this incredibly difficult. The best way to protect yourself and others is a good Google Search and look into who you're buying from. If you got burned by GVH, you should have already been turned away by the amount of threads about GVH. If you bought a GVH Service anyways even with the threads or simply didn't look and trusted WHT and their Corporate Member tag, well then I have no-one else to blame but the client. For some people, too cheap of a price is almost irresistible and can't be persuaded against it. Just like why you should do research on the manufacturer on your new replacement wheel and trust to make sure it's not some cheap off-brand service that will break at critical times. Some people think too lightly of Web Hosting and if you do then as much as I'd love to help you out, it's not worth my time working for peanuts. If you want something reliable and ran by someone who's knowledgeable and will be able to take care of the problem quickly then you're going to need to do you research.
You want bare-bone servers on the cheap with terrible customer support but no reason to really contact support because everything is automated? Go OVH and their sub-brands. You want a reliable shared hosting system where you can just "set and forget"? I can recommend several who are run by staff members I know will be able to answer everything for you without a hitch. You want to run a gameserver on an unmanaged VPS? Sure but make sure you know what you're getting into. Want to just set the gameserver up and forget it? I think you should move away from unmanaged VPSes and look more into companies that specialize in that sort of things.
And with that... my rant is done.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and give my comments. Also just to cover my butt and making sure this isn't taken in any misunderstood way, this is my own opinion and does not represent policies or view of vpsB since I do enjoy participating in the community as well as being on staff helping out the community.
======================================================
My comments may or may not come off as a bit dickish. But it's just the opinions I get from the video.
======================================================
As a general rule of thumb, if you want to be taken seriously then don't curse in a video and show that you're pissed off. It more and more perpetrates that you have a bone to pick with them and might have other agendas involved.
1. You're expecting WHT to become a governing body of the Web Hosting industry through their Corporate Membership badge.
1.a. Surprisingly, WHT is not a governing body of the Web Hosting Industry.
1.a.i. This is how regular business works. It's just much more/easily seen because of the nature of the internet. Always as a rule of thumb you should probably do some background research on who you're buying from. The mechanic down the road from your house? Maybe he's known in the automotive industry as being a guy who acts all friendly but then screws you with fake problems if he thinks you're a sap. People will dislike him of course but if he decides to advertise his services on any car-service-forum/website and someone actually buys it without research, well then who should be to blame? What should be happening here is the individual realizing their mistake, learning a lesson, and moving on (because that's part of life). It's crappy when you get sucked into it but sometimes it's better to learn and go on living.
1.b. The expectations you're demanding has a different definition from one person to another. In order for your demand to work, this needs to be standardized. However, not everyone will be happy with it and will curse at you (the staff) regardless because they didn't get in due to "so and so" but "so and so already got in and already are successful with their own _".
1.b.i. The amount of manpower required to sift through those "Audits" and "application process" can be time consuming. People assume it's incredibly quick and easy since they can do it too from their armchair, however (due to the capacity I bet WHT gets) they'd have to hire a few people full-time to sift through the amount of "crap applications". Don't forget the amount of PMs and messages you get from other individuals who are also demanding your attention on this and that issue and "this person angered me because so and so and should be banned" or "this person said this about me and I find it uncalled for I want you to delete it and their account" (you'd be surprised...). In my opinion, it's simply asking for an increased workload from the WHT team.
1.c. You're expecting a privately held company whose bottom line is profits and not ethics to police their own income... Yeah... You see the giant meltdown on Reddit?
2. The general idea behind a free market is that prices change depending on what people are willing to pay. You may say "paying 1000 dollars to get my post stickied on WHT is bs!" but for some people (as you can obviously see), they do pay that (or get a reduced pricing through discounts or for free. However WHT values it at 1k USD and it seems to be pretty popular).
2.a. You're also ignoring the fact that running WHT surprisingly has costs. Whether it may be infrastructure costs, staffing costs, or advertising costs. I don't use WHT (I don't think I have an account there), however my assumptions are going to be that the only people who actually get paid are members of iNET Interactive and the community leaders. This of course depends on the back-end of WHT but with the amount of butthurt script kiddies or just people who sometimes decides to DDoS for fun in addition to the pretty large amount of traffic they get (currently 2349 concurrent users online), I'm going to bet their infrastructure costs and staffing costs are pretty high. Again, surprisingly not everyone works for third world country wages and if they do, well then you know you're going to get a half-baked terrible experience as you well know by GVH and Johnnyboy having his (younger? baby? I don't remember) sister do server migrations. Having talented people on staff costs a pretty penny and goes a long way.
2.b. If people are willing to pay for it, then good for them. I hope they actually get a return on the amount of money they spend.
3. Again surprisingly some people don't like Google. WHT is simply creating another service to increase the value of their Corporate Membership. If you use it, go for it. If you don't, whatever you can always just use Google Alerts as a good alternative. I'm guaranteeing you no-one immediately buys a corporate membership just for the keyword alerts. However, it might be a nice addition to have instead of going through Google or so and so services and dealing with that.
3.a. Also don't forget sometimes Google can take a while to crawl a site. Therefore a WHT Keyword Alert Tool could potentially notify you earlier than Google. If someone finds that more valuable (since a ton of people are afraid of "Google will Cache this and then my business will be ruined!!!") then it might be more worth it for them. You need to consider more than just your perspective. Again, I'm going to be coming off really dickish but this video is incredibly single-sided and there's no volume to it.
tldr: I dislike the GVH situation as much as the next person. I also find the Corporate Membership not worth it and also a completely waste of funds. However, I don't see any problem with WebHostingTalk trying to increase the value of their Corporate Member. From the customer's side, I wish there was a easy guide and information to keep people from purchasing services from obviously shoddy companies. However the unique nature of the internet and this industry and no formal system setup make this incredibly difficult. The best way to protect yourself and others is a good Google Search and look into who you're buying from. If you got burned by GVH, you should have already been turned away by the amount of threads about GVH. If you bought a GVH Service anyways even with the threads or simply didn't look and trusted WHT and their Corporate Member tag, well then I have no-one else to blame but the client. For some people, too cheap of a price is almost irresistible and can't be persuaded against it. Just like why you should do research on the manufacturer on your new replacement wheel and trust to make sure it's not some cheap off-brand service that will break at critical times. Some people think too lightly of Web Hosting and if you do then as much as I'd love to help you out, it's not worth my time working for peanuts. If you want something reliable and ran by someone who's knowledgeable and will be able to take care of the problem quickly then you're going to need to do you research.
You want bare-bone servers on the cheap with terrible customer support but no reason to really contact support because everything is automated? Go OVH and their sub-brands. You want a reliable shared hosting system where you can just "set and forget"? I can recommend several who are run by staff members I know will be able to answer everything for you without a hitch. You want to run a gameserver on an unmanaged VPS? Sure but make sure you know what you're getting into. Want to just set the gameserver up and forget it? I think you should move away from unmanaged VPSes and look more into companies that specialize in that sort of things.
And with that... my rant is done.
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fixidixi
Active Member
please take up the flag and go against all the news websites because they do not relay the facts but a twisted version of the correspondents understanding. all the news readers are affected by those twisted stories and thats harmful. [turning it down] sorry couldnt help myself
Thanks for the write up, I will respond accordingly and no problem about being dickish I can handle it. There are a few things I disagree with on:
1.a) They are in my opinion, I think a lot, and everyone knows about them and they play a huge influence in hosts reputations, They own the market for anything web-hosting related, I cannot find a bigger forum. Although, their forum activity has gone down, I still believe the majority of the hosting industry knows about them.
1.b.i) "The amount of manpower required to sift through those "Audits" and "application process" can be time consuming. People assume it's incredibly quick and easy since they can do it too from their armchair, however (due to the capacity I bet WHT gets) they'd have to hire a few people full-time to sift through the amount of "crap applications". Don't forget the amount of PMs and messages you get from other individuals who are also demanding your attention on this and that issue and "this person angered me because so and so and should be banned" or "this person said this about me and I find it uncalled for I want you to delete it and their account" (you'd be surprised...). In my opinion, it's simply asking for an increased workload from the WHT team."
Well, what I would say to this is don't offer the corporate tag then if they cannot handle it. They are getting paid $1,400 a year and if they cannot handle or stay up to date with QA and handling of background information for hosts, they are just deceiving future clients / visitors that are looking for reputable hosts. That's my main point / argument in the whole video really, it's sad if you think about. The regular Joe comes to WHT and finds a thread, sees that, that person has a 'corporate title' and automatically deems trustworthiness and probably doesn't even google them or look up reviews. That's now how the corporate tag is right now with no QA background checks done and it's a false promise.
2.a) "You're also ignoring the fact that running WHT surprisingly has costs." That's sounds like their personal problem though and it's offset by their advertisements. Their site is absolutely littered with ads and I'm sure you know from their forum activity (mostly guests/bot views) they generate a lot more than you think. I'm not even going to go into their forum software and how bloated it is.
In regards to your google point. That's fair and I accept that view. Just one thing though, I have no doubt in my mind that google crawlers/indexers don't waste a second getting information/keywords off WHT. It's littered with em. And has been for ages. But, I can understand how some people don't like google, and maybe, you know what maybe google alerts does take a long time. It never has for me personally, but I can see your point there and it's 100% valid.
"The best way to do it is to do a good Google Search and look into who you're buying from."
Oh, I agree entirely and that's the problem I have with WHT. The average joe doesn't do that, but they rely on just the corporate tag and boom, that's it. As I said in my video when I talked about the Indian web master analogy. Basically, I said that because I launched one of my Indian friends website for him and before the whole process he told me he was looking on webhostingtalk and linked me a thread (this was a couple years ago), and said he told me he liked this host and I asked.. 'oh why?' he said well, his profile seems professional and he has a 'forum badge'.
I said, ohh okay let me check him out, etc then I, personally, did the reviews / background checking. It was for a company called 'StableHost', not sure if you've heard about them, but they turned out great. What if I wasn't there? What if he saw GreenValueHost instead and made the purchase, but, then to find out his website is offline 2 weeks later? That's not fair for the average joe trying to find a host, it's a sham by WHT to mislead viewers into a false promise. It's not 100% WHT's fault, but they play a huge role in it and they need to be held accountable.
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