$7 ... part 2, with an actual Poll !! (Re-post, Sorry) - Have your say.
AnthonySmith
ModeratorHosting ProviderOGSenpai
Repost because I edited the last one to add clarity, and it deleted the poll.
Part 2, as promised, I think Part 1 has run its natural life.
I have to admit, I started this with the personal feeling that the price had to go up, my mind was changed. It's good to talk 
What became obvious is that the price is not the singular problem, $7 must stay, it is meaningful, but it may not be fit for the original purpose it was supposed to have.
Having thought about it, I believe this is a rare case where we can actually cater for everyone, here is what I propose based on the collective comments from Part 1.
Rule and small platform change.
$7 stays exactly how it is in the regular offers section (not a change, just for the avoidance of doubt).
We add a section for $15 p/year or less offers. These are real LE* Spirit offers for those of us who still have it, and we add a perk for hosts that can offer these (Perk to be decided)
We change the existing LES Exclusive offers section and rules, the new rule is that they don't need to be exclusive , but you can only post in here once every 2 (maybe 4) weeks, they are still for logged-in users only, we pick a meaningful name that clearly indicates the intent and make it known these are for logged in users only and not google indexed no other limitations
This caters for allowing hosts to be able to show off some of their higher-end plans; some of the community wants that, clearly, hosts do. This allows the general weekly $7 offers continue. This puts some real spirit back into LES.
If carefully executed, I really do not see a downside, unless you feel more offer posts are a bad thing, in which case I just have to kind of suck in some air and bare my teeth and shrug.
- Should be do this?25 votes
- Yes, lets do this!52.00%
- No, do not change anything.32.00%
- I honestly don't care either way 50/5016.00%
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Comments
Seems okay!
Seems okay!
I think you mean $15 p/year or less yearly offers. So the proposed new section is the place for those who want low priced yearly offers to look.
Probably I am way too clueless™ but I am having difficulty understanding how dropping the exclusivity requirement from the LES Exclusive offers section and further limiting the number of allowed offer posts benefits LES.
A random provider might think: "Well, LES now allows my company to post this higher priced offer everywhere, but if we also post it to LES, we can post only one offer on LES in this higher priced category every two weeks, our offer on LES won't be indexed by the search engines, and our offer only can be seen by logged in LES users. LES doesn't have sufficient logged in users volume to attract enough customers for us! Everyone already will have seen our offer everywhere else, anyway! I have better uses for my time than posting to the LES Non-Exclusive Offers section."
If the higher priced offers here remain exclusive of other sites, I.e., only at LES, then the motivation attracting providers to post in the still-Exclusive section remains the high quality Low End oriented audience here.
Maybe you set up the LES organizational structure right the first time!? Maybe it isn't broken!? Maybe it doesn't need to be fixed!?
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Born from part 1, but the quick version is that the fact that it has to be exclusive actively discourages providers from posting great deals here that may be slightly higher end while still great value MB per $, so the proposal is we lengthen the time between posts and remove the requirement for them to be exclusive.
This scenario is basically exactly how it is now, except they also would have the burden of making it special just for us, which pretty much no one is doing. The theory is that having to make it special for a pretty small niche forum is the blocker, not the amount of times they can post. As an example, I cant see Hetzner bothering to let us know about their latest 360TB Storage server with GPU if they also have to pair that with an exclusive discount code for ONLY lowendspirit.
I appreciate that's the other end of the scale, but hopefully makes my point clear, something I seem to be struggling with today (I am genuinely over medicated right now, sorry)
I could be wrong; if I am, just a proposal based on the original discussion in part 1.
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What if the new "LF-LESBIANS" (Limited For LESbians) section, the proposed area for logged-in users only, makes the offer private for just a day or two, and then automatically releases it? It shouldn't be difficult to achieve that.
If I have understood correctly, the logic in the third section appears somewhat flawed. Since this is not an exclusive offer, restricting Google indexing and requiring users to log in to view it seems pointless and would diminish its dissemination effectiveness.
$6.99 pls
Insert signature here, $5 tip required
$15 is good
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
$15/mo should be added.
Just a quick reaction:
Insofar as rule 1 is the current rule, which says at most $7/month, then rule 2 is already covered by rule 1. In other words, rule 2 is compatible with rule 1 -- rule 1 has always allowed for yearly VPS offers as long as they cost at most $7/month on average
Rule 2 is at best a convenience -- by way of a new category -- for users who are looking for yearly offers that cost at most $15/year and want to locate them quickly, but otherwise, it's a case that's already covered by rule 1
Or have I missed something?
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
I guess I can't explain this in a way that everyone understands, I am not sure exactly why I am struggling with that but I am the common thread, so sorry @host_c it's clearly me. I was quick to anger.
In the most simple terms I am suggesting splitting the 2 offer sections we have into 3 offer sections.
$15 p/year max
$7 p/month
No limit on price.
Apply optimal perks and platform limitations to all 3 to reduce or remove crossover.
The goal is to stop alienating some hosts, stop activly dissuading existing hosts from posting great offers, acknowledge our place on the internet, reward the lowendspirit.
Please just apply your own common sense and logic to the above and you will probably be about right.
I don't know how else to explain it, maybe some one else can try, if not, complex rules may be the real issue here, it's impossible to get a universal standard.
Based on the voting so far, there is probably not enough appetite for change anyway. Which is also fine.
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As I tried to say above, if this is merely the suggestion of a new offer section, then it shouldn't be so controversial (beyond the extra effort in bookkeeping on the part of providers and mods to make sure that this offer section is used as intended)
In contrast, this is veritably new
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
So we have 3 tiers:
And here comes the LLM corrected why, sorry, to tiered to not mess up my own words today:
1 - Provider Eligibility (2 Years + 2 Years)
- Provider must be active on LES for at least 2 years
- Provider must also be in business for at least 2 years
2 - Posting Limits
- Maximum 1 Premium thread per provider per month
- Maximum 3 SKUs per thread
3 - SKUs Must Be LES-Specific - This is important.
4 - Billing Term Restrictions
This is about Premium value, not unlimited time:
Now a bit , more detail on the above.
1 - Provider Eligibility – 2 Years + 2 Years
If this section is meant for higher-value services, it should require stability - or a minimum form of it. FrankZ wrote me a thing ~3 years back, and he was right.
This mirrors the yearly-offer requirement logic. Established operators won’t have a problem with this.
If someone does… well… Premium offers probably aren’t the right battlefield for them..... for the moment.
This protects:
We don’t want:
“Unlimited Value – Enterprise NVMe – 30 cores – $29/mo”
followed by “We regret to inform you…” 4 months later.
2 - Posting Limits
To prevent it from becoming just “Regular Sales V2.0”:
For Operators: If this is supposed to represent your best higher-tier offerings, then curate it.
If you can’t pick 3 premium SKUs, maybe they’re not premium. ( If you think you have too may to post, news-flash 20% of your offers are usually premium, not all of them, wake up! )
3 - Must Be LES-Specific SKUs (No Discount Code Recycling)
In my view, this is important the most important.
These offers should be:
If an operator goes through the effort of:
That shows commitment.
If it’s just:
“Here’s our normal product, use code LESBIGBOYDILDO”
…it defeats the purpose.
If this section exists, it should feel like:
“We built this for LES.”
Not:
“We copy-pasted this from our Black Friday page.”
4 - Billing Terms – This is also Important
This is about premium value, not unlimited time. ( Time is the one thing you cannot buy, premium promo you can )
So:
Reasonable billing cycles:
On a forum, there’s room for:
Now, if you wish to trash the above LLM corrected post, feel free to do so on our thread, not on this one.
Host-C | Storage by Design | AS211462
“If it can’t guarantee behavior under load, it doesn’t belong in production.”
For me this is the only part I could not get behind, because this in my view is why the LES Exclusive section is essentially dead, you think big hosts are going to duplicate and make specific SKU's just for LES? they just see that as a pain in the ass, that was the exact problem this change was trying to solve after this exact problem was identified as part of the problem with that section to begin with.
If I am going to be doing outreach to hosts that don't advertise here (That was my plan) I think that will be a tough sell to be honest.
/2c
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Well, true also, I will not argue on that, yet, LES specific SKU would push the forum UP. Premium SKU + Promo code will turn you int a marketplace. None of them is wrong, it all depends on what the bigger picture is.
I can vouch that to create a Separate SKU is not that hard ( some just have to push a Duplicate Product button and set up a new name, price and maybe adjust some specs ). But you are not wrong either, it is easier to get more operators in if they don't' have to do a separate SKU.
My only problem with promo codes is leakage, I know that it will happen, but if a see almost 0 activity on the sales thread but have 15 orders in 5 seconds, I know something is wrong, and LES members did not get it. this is the reason I did different types of contests for the promo codes. Truth is that without some kind of integration between the forum and the billing panel, there is no 100% way to know if it was sold for LES or other. ( I might also over-complicate things also )
EDIT: Filtering By promo codes is a bit complicated as you have the same SKU, filtering via SKU will give you the results you wish with out other gymics.
For an operator it is important to know what SKU's are alive, how many were canceled, how many abused, from what sales channel were they initially sold.
These start to make sense and become important after a time.
I would personally do a separate SKU, why? because I can export the sales list and filter by SKU to see if I actually made a sale with those or not, what the profit margins were on them in 3, 6 moths, can I go lower?. Separate SKU helps me do a bit of Financial Analysis, yet, I will not debate if others do the same or use other metrics. I just wrote what should technically be more beneficial and in the same time be a better image for LES. - it is a choice of semantics, nothing mandatory, I am fine with both sincerely, but it does look more cool in the users panel to see ' LES SPECIAL", it will stay there with them for as long as the service lives.
EDIT:
Yet, you are right on the mandatory part, each operator chooses it's sales strategy, so you could just " recommend " that part.
There is, trust me.
Yet some might see this as an end to LES spirit of cheap hosting, and it is not about that.
It is not about killing the budget spirit, actually on the contrary, this would give possibility for small operators to grow. Offer the same cheap products and grow a bit with those offers that actually make the money.
For the average User: If you think that for an operator to make more then 1 USD / SKU is blasphemy, then just remember, the higher tier SKU pay your 7 USD obsessions, and maybe, maybe you will not see as much dead-pool in 1 or 2 years.
Wider offers also drive competition, so this will not necessarily mean everyone will post 50 USD / Month offers. It is up to the operators to do that and choose what they wish to post, let that be they're problem, not yours as a user.
To those that think the above is 100% blasphemy: WAKE UP!, we are not in 2013. If you cannot see that, it is not me, it is you.
Host-C | Storage by Design | AS211462
“If it can’t guarantee behavior under load, it doesn’t belong in production.”