New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
HostDoc are closing down
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Kindly stop to BS us!
YOU introduced the barrier "can you prove ...?" - I simply turned it around and asked you whether you can prove what you said and implied.
FYI: I'm not a Virmach customer and I don't care about them. But one can't but notice that Virmach is a large low end provider. They are for example #235 on the Inc top 5000 list and have had over 2 Mio $ revenue in 2018 and they have 11 locations, 9 in the USA and 2 in Europe.
@poisson @tester4
Yep. @cociu who has been there and has done it recently said something to the effect of "The first 100 servers are the hard part".
Economy of scale is indeed a very major factor. Example If all you have at the beginning is a single dedi with 5 TB bandwidth and dual 1 Gb/s interfaces you have to either run that node far below capacity or risk that a single bad customer puts your whole business in danger.
If on the other hand you have a couple of dozen nodes in at least one full rack you get much better prices for pretty much every ingredient needed for your operation plus you can have a way better balanced load.
Another good example is support. It's virtually not feasible to provide 24/7/365 support with say 3 hour response time on average. It's basically the owner himself who runs the whole show. To have even 1 single employee you need lots of nodes
Amen.
Now the new rule to be added to LET along with CC and LEB based scammers.
I need to find alternative wordpress host, right now, hosted by HostDoc, I am afraid to take all wordpress backup as is, instead shall use content import/export to setup new site.
Plenty of reliable one-man hosts like @MikeA
and @anthonysmith exists. For the are they technical enough part, anyone can just say yes.
The doc was technical enough to fix the issues, just lacked the soft skills required to deal with the human elements of his business.
All is good @dahartigan 👍. I knew I was right with what I was saying and stuck with it. From what I have seen your recent commenting around the place/s has shown your true better side.
I had a few months away and it has done me good with how I look at things, HD has stated before I always hang around and kick the brand when it is down or having issues but I have no ill words rather all the best.
No plural of staff, unless you mean long sticks, which could be appropriate.
In all honesty, and all due respect for the Doc - even if he now decided to not go belly up - I still wouldn't trust him with my VMs.
While I do appreciate a good drama - the fact that he is willing to shut down over his enormous ego being hurt - that is a big flashing red signal, and even if he continues his business - how long will that last? Till the next small bump on the road?
Ain't nobody got time for that.
rofl
This shits better then Eastenders!!!! Well my crappy lowend VPS with stingy CPU resource is still avaliable if anyone needs.
Just saying.
At least, you are honest about the quality of your service.
Props to dat.
Lowend hosts should act like one. State that their services are crap and tell them not to expect too much.
Prove that backups are always important, and no matter how good the service is, it's hard to avoid something unexpected...
It's easier then explaining to someone why there 40% of 1 core and 256MB of RAM not achieving 1Gbps burst download speeds.
That is the point. Plenty of us can buy a server, install some software and start to sell "Black Friday super offers". But can we offer a reliable service which will not be closed in few months? Can we upgrade the servers? Can we deal safely with some attacks?
Can we pay 2 employees to complete our hard work for our own business? Or we just expect to deal on our own with everything and to be the best ones, to make thousands of euros?
Maybe not with so many words but I agree to a certain point. Still, if you see what people expect with a $20 / year VPS, it will blow your mind
It won't blow my mind.
It just reinforces a simple fact: Those with slave mentality will never overcome their own limitations.
You just need to be honest. I think 8 hours response time is perfectly fine with a lowend vps.
Also you need to carefully choose your customers. If you sell high risk hosting, game servers etc you will get a lot of shady customers and lots of support tickets and abuse to deal with.
I'm an IT consultant myself, I do this just for fun and don't even make a profit but it's perfectly doable. I get like a few tickets a week and have many customers.
I disagree. A response time of 8 hours or support only from 9 to 5 smells unprofessional. Although I could live with that with some of my VPS I don't accept it because then your work day will be quite filled.
The point IMO isn't so much "x hours" but rather "at the very minimum from 6 am to 10 pm". Keep in mind that many customers' work hours are the same as yours so they will often deal with their server after work.
The really funny part is the question why they expect so much. It's because some providers out there offer it or accept it
I myself expect half of a thread of an older CPU (56xx, 26xx v2, etc.) core, 256 MB (512 if I'm lucky) of RAM (probably DDR3 but DDR2 is OK too), 7 to 10 GB SSD, and 250+GB traffic. Plus a panel one can work with (e.g. remote console) and a support reaction time of no more than 3 hours on average.
Why the latter? Because "cheap VPS" to me does not mean "one man shop with 1 or 2 nodes" but rather "professional provider who sells left equipment lifetime of older systems" (while offering more modern nodes for a higher price, maybe with faster support and some gadgets too).
And btw such a professional provider, even a smaller one with say only a single location, knows how the game is played and how to keep or clean abusers out of his operations.
The only exception I make is when a provider (e.g. @seriesn) (a) seems to be a good guy and (b) tries a somewhat different path than the majority -and- is customer focused. With those guys a response time of "tomorrow morning" is OK - but funnily not needed because they are obsessed with making their customers happy.
And btw, now that @cociu seems to offer reasonable (often even good) support and reaction times he will blow quite a few low end providers out of the water. Black Friday only kills the lowest end, the utterly unprepared or mindless ones. The main killer always was and still is "the better one kills the good one"
That's also why I noticed and believe in seriesn. He goes a different route, a better and more attractive one; he stands out of the crowd of providers who all offer pretty much the same, and he seems to work like an animal. If he offers good response time too (he seems to) he'll stay unstoppable.
Thanks , we have declared the year 2020 for improove quality so yes we are 100% in this . You will note the change verry soon.
It depends you know. I usually give support when I'm awake so yes probably from 7 am in the morning up until 11 hours in the evening. However, there are always customers living in another timezone. Like US customers will be active when I'm sleeping so sometimes they have to wait 7 hours. Then again, when I do business with US providers it's the same for me. I have to wait until about 4 in the afternoon before they wake up.
It also depends on the nature of the issue. If it's an administrative issue it can probably wait longer. If it's service outage then support should be quick to resolve it.
Plus the providers you're mentioning I don't think they're that special. We're all customer focussed and obsessed with what we do. I'm behind a PC the majority of the day. I especially do it because I think it's fun and I like doing it, I think that goes for the majority as well.
This: regardless of cost.
So has anyone actually received a refund from hostdoc?
I think someone here said that he did.
I just finished picking up last valuable bytes and sent a cancellation request.
not lucky yet
You can just read why he closed it. There was no profit margin.
I see 2020 isn't the year of the spellchecker.
You misspelled autocorrect.
Haha, good point, I just went with the suggestion. But it's like cociu goes out of his way to disable built in auto correct and suggested words.
Not enough profit and lack of dedication, business is though