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Quality or Affordability?
pioneernetworks
Member
I have a question. Would most of the users rather pay for "quality" of service for example, better hardware, network, support? Or pay for mid-grade, network somewhat okay, couple hour response time service? Would you rather pay $9 for a vps that you could get for $3 off a generic website? Just wondering your thoughts.
Comments
for me, it depends on where you will use it. different priorities for different purposes.
As @jcaleb mentioned, different providers for different purposes but for me, I'd have to say mid-range personally. I don't mind as long as the service has great uptime and provider responds to tickets in 24hours or less.
I think what people now want with providers is more Locations, Which is what I respect edis for doing. It is not really about who can provide 15/30 Minute responses all the time, Or what providers are using the latest server grade CPUs/Hardware.
The thing is that there is not rule. Some hosts are so damn great.. for only 3$ months and some even with 30$ monthly fee can't satisfy customer needs. Usually time and long term experience show quality of certain host not monthly fee we pay for.
Yes of course, going with reputable 20 - 50$ host can save us a lot of headache most of the time but then again.. even in 2$ - 5$ range exist some long term reputable hosts with great hosting (network, gear..) and support (quality, response time..) performance, so there really isn't rule regarding fee we pay for service.
This site is live example that "you get what you pay for" isn't always true. Even in budget hosting segment some people put a lot of pride in their service and sometimes for few bucks we get more than we expected and hoped for.
For me personally affordability is more important and a response time within 24h is ok as long as the price is good. If I pay more I expect more, if a provider advertises a cheap VPS with decent specs I don't mind waiting a bit more. The main thing IMHO is to be honest - tell people what they will get and why and then everybody is happy since I knew going in what's what.
This was our initial business plan, didn't work out for us. Now it's volume.
generally, i prefer good price and reasonable service. then lots of redundancy and backups. because even if you pay huge $$$, there is no guarantee it wont get corrupt or whatnot.
I go for quality - for me it's just not worth having to spend hours setting up a server again and switch IPs over in the event of data loss or having to switch providers.
This is abit like VPS.net, With their "Reliable" san setups, I'm sure you all have heard the horror stories all over WHT.
VPS.net is not a typical HA/Cloud provider - they give a bad name to the industry.
I typically only go with affordable providers (say, <$10 a month, exceptions do exist), but only if they have decent support. I'd expect a response to a downtime (or otherwise important) ticket in 24 hours, and a response to an unimportant (rDNS, upgrades, etc) ticket in 7 days.
More importantly, I expect a direct response that actually addresses the question I asked, so most large providers (Strato, Santrex, and those kind of companies) are already out of the question regardless of price, as they can't seem to manage to give a direct response to support tickets.
Downtime typically isn't a huge issue for me, as most of the stuff I've set up is very redundant.
Another interesting point is locations - I'm always looking for more locations where I don't have any VPSes yet, because of aforementioned redundancy
here's two kinds of providers i look for.
1) network stability
I host an ircd, and I am a big irc user. so if your net is stable, has a native v6 preferably from level3, and you do automated rdns from client side, I don't care too much about your disk speed, whatever. if you're lacking on the cpu/disk side, i wouldn't pay more than $20 a year for 128mB
-OR-
2) overall quality
linode, 6sync, inceptionhosting, hostigation, bitcable. willing to pay a premium for premium services.
Yep, why you'd need to pay £60 a month for wordpress hosting is rather stupid.
If I'm going to charge someone for a spot on a system, vps or dedicated, I'll pay what it takes to offer quality. For the little systems I use for favors for friends/family and personal use, it's all about the middle ground. Price doesn't mean quality, as with any market. However, quality does come at a price, so that's not a reason to be cheap.
@pioneernetworks should clarify his question better. because what is expensive/cheap and quality has many meanings for different people. and also how we judge quality is affected by our needs.
Why should the two be mutually exclusive?
good point!
It has to work.. it has to work.. it has to work... it MUST work.
Did I mention, it has to work? Thats important.
Lets say you buy some ads, or get a plug, and people go to your site only to find it crashed?
If you spend $100 on ads, and your hosting provider is in the toilet, you've just flushed that $100. Some things, like plugs, organic links & directory listings can't be quantified in dollars... and if the directory owner sees your site, crashed.. do you suppose they'll re-list you? .... yeah...
Thats what happened to me... some bargain! (and the sad thing is, I WENT with what I thought was a mid-range host, they were more expensive than the other guys)
MY reputation was damaged, reliability rating is still in the crapper, even got a plug on a radio station.. (which is nearly impossible, when you ARE a radio station)
Only to have listeners disconnected in a most frustrating manner.
Ended up costing far more... and it made me look stooopid. Even if you have money to burn, you can't buy a reputation.
Also cost me a day while I moved everything over to another host. I'm up and running great (now), but I get to spend my time trying to rebuild my reputation after this whole incident. I'm at around 80% reliability on tunein.com, which is pathetic... to say nothing of the people who will NEVER return because when they got there, they were disconnected, reconnected, disconnected, reconnected,......
The other features range between "nice to have" and "liability". Control panels are dumb and impose security issues. It doesn't matter how often they do backups if you go to use those backups and discover they're crap/didn't happen.
If you have a hosting provider that doesn't work, you shouldn't even bother. Only thing crappy hosting might be good for is, I dunno... games maybe? You couldn't even use em' for storage if they're crashed when you need your files.