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Yellowpages of LEB Providers?
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Yellowpages of LEB Providers?

mikhomikho Member, Host Rep
edited May 2012 in Providers

Hello fellow LET members,
I have a question that I hope you will give me some feedback on.

I'm thinking of setting up some sort of a "yellowpages" with main focus on the providers (the company, not person behind it), not the packages that they offer (a list with their default packages will be included).

Information that will be added are stuff like personal reflection on TOS, what they do have in their AUP etc ..
I've made a little mindmap to get things going but is it enough? What would you like to see on a page like this?
image

First of all, would it be of interest at all?

What is missing, something defined wrong in my mindmap?

all input is welcome... its still in the planning phase so nothing is carved in stone :)

Thanked by 1Asim
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Comments

  • yomeroyomero Member

    Loving your idea.
    Can be helpful to search providers by an specific feature :)

  • AsimAsim Member

    Awesome

  • inverseinverse Member

    I'm also loving this idea :)

  • JacobJacob Member

    <3 this.

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    @yomero said: Can be helpful to search providers by an specific feature

    That's part of the "planning" that (almost?) every field should be searchable.
    oh, added one more thing: Company Land of origin. Not always a company is based in the same country it has it servers.

  • ErkanErkan Member

    offer an API so people can add themselves info (instead crawling by bots yourself)
    though you have to filter than good-people vs. bad-people over time

    ideally you'd have more advantages if you offer people polling/pushing over API

  • ErkanErkan Member

    the review /reflection part could be distinctive against other such ideas out there

    though: this could also be seen as "stalking" perhaps(?)
    since it would be aggregated on one place

  • daviddavid Member

    Yeah, this is a good idea.

  • jcalebjcaleb Member

    a little bit tricky, but performance should be consider the location. because providers on same package can be on different locations.

  • AldryicAldryic Member
    edited May 2012

    @MikHo - Looks to be a pretty swell idea, I hope you follow through with it :P I wouldn't mind spotting you a small VM out of my budget if you need a place to host on during production/testing.

  • AdamAdam Member
    edited May 2012

    @taipres take it as a compliment that someone liked your "idea" enough to include it in their brainstorming.

    @MikHo I wouldn't mind seeing a scraper that would aggregate the latest posts by the provider (from WHT, LEB, and similar sites). In that regard though, I would have two categories for scraping. One for offers, and the other for offtopic.
    That way a user would be able to see current specials without digging, and would get a feel for the owner/s.

  • taiprestaipres Member
    edited May 2012

    @Adam said: @MikHo I wouldn't mind seeing a scraper that would aggregate the latest posts by the provider (from WHT, LEB, and similar sites). In that regard though, I would have two categories for scraping. One for offers, and the other for offtopic.

    That way a user would be able to see current specials without digging, and would get a feel for the owner/s.

    That's a good idea :) It may violate the sites TOS in terms of automation but they shouldn't be too upset over it. He could also scrap the providers twitter posts since they tend to post specials and such on there, granted it may need a manual review. Even an option to let providers input their deals themselves into his DB would be nice, or a way for the providers to make a "sitemap" type deal on their web servers with new offers so his bot could look for that and auto input. Similar to the way google/bing bots use to index a site's content easier.

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    I was about to go to sleep when I decided to do a last check in on LET on my phone and when reading this I decided to get up again and answer:

    @taipres said: Admit you got lot of the listing criteria ideas from my site, because you're practically running down the list. In fact you are LOL.

    Not really, and you might not trust me on this but I listed the things after reading a few providers TOS and trying to gather what they had written in them. I'm not sure there are that many more things that providers lists in their TOS. Perhaps Voip was somewhere in the back of my head from visiting you site earlier this morning...
    I will admit to looking at your site and actually "taking" the idea to list the birthday/age of the providers domain. But then again, thats not a new "idea". NS-servers has that information... or did you steal the idea from there? (mark the sarcasm).
    I'm not sure how it will be formatted when published but thats to be solved when doing that part.

    In general I have nothing against your site. My idea is not focusing on the offer or packages that the provider has ... Its the provider information.
    There has been posts lately about BuyVM TOS, both on the changes that they now allow TOR and their behaviour of suspending all services if one invoice is late.
    VPS6 connection with Dan Fry .. true or not.. I don't care right now but people interested in their services might be.

    Thats the type of information that I will be highlight when/if this idea goes live.

    other sites I've been looking at for inspiration are:
    http://vps-list.cryto.net/
    http://webhomepal.com/
    http://www.robtex.com/

    and a few others..

    And the project name for this: Project Facebum (no inspiration AT ALL from Facebook)
    sponsored by: http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

    @Aldryic said: Looks to be a pretty swell idea, I hope you follow through with it :P I wouldn't mind spotting you a small VM out of my budget if you need a place to host on during production/testing.

    Thanks for the offer, I do have a few VPS's that I wasn't using that will be used for testing. I might however send out some emails to some providers to fill out my db with information to test stuff with.

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    @taipres said: twitter

    Forgot about that... I'll add it :)

    @Adam said: I wouldn't mind seeing a scraper that would aggregate the latest posts by the provider (from WHT, LEB, and similar sites).

    Think that would tend to build up alot of data over time, perhaps it would be easier to create searchlinks for "known words" for that provider on WHT, LET... etc...

    @taipres said: Even an option to let providers input their deals themselves into his DB would be nice,

    The site will not be an "offer site", I have LEB for that. :) At this time I'm leaning on showing the base packages that the provider has.

  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @MikHo said: I might however send out some emails to some providers to fill out my db with information to test stuff with.

    Sounds good. Queries for us can either be PM'd to myself or Francisco, or sent directly to [email protected] , we'll be happy to participate :3

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    @Erkan said: offer an API so people can add themselves info (instead crawling by bots yourself)

    though you have to filter than good-people vs. bad-people over time

    Maybe in version 5 or so :) Right now I'm not sure on how to pull this together but somehow it will :)

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    @Aldryic said: Sounds good. Queries for us can either be PM'd to myself or Francisco, or sent directly to [email protected] , we'll be happy to participate :3

    I know where to find you ;)

  • vedranvedran Veteran

    If we could stop derailing this thread with pointless who invented the internet discussion that would be great. My delete button is starting to wear off.

  • I would add info about their support - 24/7, or specific hours, or "whenever we feel like it"; and also possibly how many support agents they have (if you can find out).

  • JTRJTR Member

    What about a database of as many providers as possible, searchable by features? Say I wanted a VPS with a 1gbps port, 750GB-1500GB of bandwidth, and 256MB of RAM with a budget of $1-$10/month. I'd input those parameters, and it would spit out providers/packages with those specs.

  • taiprestaipres Member
    edited May 2012

    @JTR said: What about a database of as many providers as possible, searchable by features? Say I wanted a VPS with a 1gbps port, 750GB-1500GB of bandwidth, and 256MB of RAM with a budget of $1-$10/month. I'd input those parameters, and it would spit out providers/packages with those specs.

    yeah I hope one day some one comes up with that ability...that'd be really something......

  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @JTR said: What about a database of as many providers as possible, searchable by features? Say I wanted a VPS with a 1gbps port, 750GB-1500GB of bandwidth, and 256MB of RAM with a budget of $1-$10/month. I'd input those parameters, and it would spit out providers/packages with those specs.

    If I recall, wasn't @joepie91 working on something very similar to that?

    Thanked by 1TheHackBox
  • taiprestaipres Member
    edited May 2012

    @Aldryic said: If I recall, wasn't @joepie91 working on something very similar to that?

    Yeah I believe he is, but if I recall someone already did it though, months ago...

  • debugdebug Member

    @taipres said: Yeah I believe he is, but if I recall someone already did it though, months ago...

    LowEndBox?

    Thanked by 1ElliotJ
  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @taipres said: Yeah I believe he is, but if I recall someone already did it though, months ago...

    More than months ago. The basic idea, in many forms, has been around for just about as long as the hosting industry itself (longer if you want to count similar ideas applied to different, much older markets).

    At this point, anyone trying to claim "I did it first" is just a tosser, and deserves any ridicule they get. There is very, very little (if anything) left that hasn't already been done in some form or another.

  • taiprestaipres Member
    edited May 2012

    @Aldryic said: More than months ago. The basic idea, in many forms, has been around for just about as long as the hosting industry itself (longer if you want to count similar ideas applied to different, much older markets).

    Not for budget VPS's is hadn't.

  • AldryicAldryic Member

    @taipres said: Not for budget VPS's is hasn't.

    Creating my own brand of four-wheeled economic transportation does not give me the right to claim that I was the first to make a car.

  • taiprestaipres Member
    edited May 2012

    @Aldryic said: Creating my own brand of four-wheeled economic transportation does not give me the right to claim that I was the first to make a car.

    No one did it for budget VPS's before me, feature search as the users above is requesting, period, much less to the extent I did. But anyway this is the last time i'm posting in this thread. to the OP I wish you luck in your yellow page project.

  • AldryicAldryic Member
    edited May 2012

    @taipres said: No one did it for budget VPS's before me, period

    http://www.vpsguides.com

    -21:09:06- Demi:~ :: aldryic % whois vpsguides.com | grep Creat
       Creation Date: 05-mar-2009
      Creation Date........ 2009-03-05

    http://www.prchecker.info/vps-hosting.php

    -21:09:10- Demi:~ :: aldryic % whois prchecker.info | grep Creat
    Created On:08-Sep-2004 14:09:06 UTC

    And that was just a very cursory glance at the first page of a Google search for budget comparison.

    I'm seeing some basic comparison from both of these sites, which existed years before yours. How pretty you attempted to make things (while failing to compensate for all browsers, btw) is irrelevant. They still compared budget hosting companies before you did. And let's also not forget that LEB's categories are also a potential method of sorting for comparison.

    No one denies that you put a good deal of work into a site only to ruin its chances of really taking off with such a foul attitude. But trying to claim that you were actually the first website to compare budget hosting? Complete fabrication.

  • I'd say go for it. Seems you got all the needed info covered on the chart. Can't think of much else to add to it.

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