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  1. #1
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    Lightbulb The End of WebHostingTALK?

    Is it just me or has WHT turned into the budget hosting forum? What happen to the old days? where did all the real business customers go? any way to turn this trend around?

  2. #2
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    Quote Originally Posted by NetDepot - Terrence View Post
    Is it just me or has WHT turned into the budget hosting forum? What happen to the old days? where did all the real business customers go? any way to turn this trend around?
    I've noticed this as well. When I first started off, I used to be able to rent out servers for $150+/month on here. Now, the only servers I can rent out are for $50/month. I'm not even wasting my time with a Corporate Membership because it's a waste. I'd rather put that $1,200 into advertising.
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  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Encrypted View Post
    I've noticed this as well. When I first started off, I used to be able to rent out servers for $150+/month on here. Now, the only servers I can rent out are for $50/month. I'm not even wasting my time with a Corporate Membership because it's a waste. I'd rather put that $1,200 into advertising.
    Someone at iNET needs to take notice and clean thing up very fast because the jewel of the industry is going to *%^#@.

  4. #4
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    I suppose it's the credit crunch, people are all looking for the "cheapest" and not the reliable providers... until it's two late and with the Unlimited gimmick allowed here, it's all going to change.

  5. #5
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    Are you suggesting we start setting pricing minimums for providers?

    The market has become flooded, and with that the price wars began. We're not here to prevent cheap offers, and it's not what I'd consider our place to say who can advertise what here as long as it's legal and they can provide what they sell.

    As a provider of non budget offerings, it's up to you to convince buyers that basing a decision on price alone is not the best option, and show why your product is better for them, no?
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  6. #6
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    WHT is for the web hosting industry. Wherever the market takes them is what you'll see. You'll find plenty of providers who don't fit the "budget" title here - you'll just likely see more "budget" providers as time goes on as that's where a large portion of the market is going.
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  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by CW Mike View Post
    I suppose it's the credit crunch, people are all looking for the "cheapest" and not the reliable providers... until it's two late and with the Unlimited gimmick allowed here, it's all going to change.
    I really don't think that's the case, every new thread someone is looking for a $50 server and a few threads later they are complaining about poor service.

    Proper services cost money to maintain and that is why they come at a cost. Many of these new folks on here don't really understand the real cost because of all these cheap deals floating around.

  8. #8
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    Some price decline over time is to be expected. When customers see the price of bandwidth and consumer hard drives fall so much in recent years, they expect hosts to pass those savings on to them. Customers don't always understand all of the other costs linked to providing a hosting service.

    I am not really sure WHT can turn customer perception around, though. The recession encouraged a lot of people to pinch pennies.
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  9. #9
    I'd say allowing unlimited offers didn't particularly help increase the quality of the offers here. Though as bear mentioned, the market is saturated to high heaven. When you have a ton of cookie-cutter providers who offer the same or very similar services from the same or near same locations, how can one stand out and appear to be different from the other? Sell for less, is one way.

    Having price limitations is also a horrible idea. Look at LET/LEB. That place has degraded so much and turned into a contest where small, unpopular providers have to compete on price and resource allocation. There are literally people selling 2GB+ RAM, multiple IPs, laughably large disk space, etc for $5/mo just to get a sale. It's sad.
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  10. #10
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    Quote Originally Posted by NetDepot - Terrence View Post
    I really don't think that's the case, every new thread someone is looking for a $50 server and a few threads later they are complaining about poor service.

    Proper services cost money to maintain and that is why they come at a cost. Many of these new folks on here don't really understand the real cost because of all these cheap deals floating around.
    I agree, however people will learn the hard way if they go that way, people need to make mistakes to realise he differences.

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by NetDepot - Terrence View Post
    Someone at iNET needs to take notice and clean thing up very fast because the jewel of the industry is going to *%^#@.
    Clean what up exactly?
    Last edited by 1Ali; 01-20-2014 at 11:06 PM.

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by WireNine View Post
    Clean what up exactly?
    Nothing at all..

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    Quote Originally Posted by MannDude View Post
    I'd say allowing unlimited offers didn't particularly help increase the quality of the offers here.
    Unlimited offers might be "against the rules" however a few shared hosting providers disregard this "rule" and setup accounts with unlimited disk/bandwidth anyways, and offer it on their website. I won't list any names here, but yeah.
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  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_A View Post
    Unlimited offers might be "against the rules" however a few shared hosting providers disregard this "rule" and setup accounts with unlimited disk/bandwidth anyways, and offer it on their website. I won't list any names here, but yeah.
    It's currently allowed on WHT.
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  15. #15
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    Just a thought: What if WHT split the Offers section into 2 parts, Managed and Unmanaged (read: budget). I know the terms are subjective but maybe setting the requirements for a managed service as "24x7 Phone Support" or something of that nature?
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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by bear View Post
    Are you suggesting we start setting pricing minimums for providers?
    Not at all, I'm just saying the forum is heading the wrong direction in my opinion.

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_A View Post
    Unlimited offers might be "against the rules" however a few shared hosting providers disregard this "rule" and setup accounts with unlimited disk/bandwidth anyways, and offer it on their website. I won't list any names here, but yeah.
    That's not against the rules of WHT, was changed over a year ago.

    Quote Originally Posted by NetDepot - Terrence View Post
    Is it just me or has WHT turned into the budget hosting forum? What happen to the old days? where did all the real business customers go? any way to turn this trend around?
    I think the economy is more to blame for the trend not WHT.

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by bear View Post
    It's currently allowed on WHT.
    Quote Originally Posted by WireNine View Post
    That's not against the rules of WHT, was changed over a year ago
    September of 2013 or so.
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  19. #19
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    Is it just me or has WHT turned into the budget hosting forum? What happen to the old days? where did all the real business customers go? any way to turn this trend around?
    WHT audience isn't as large reaching as it should be, in age of startup fever you rarely see a mention of WebHostingTalk on HackerNews, /r/programming, Stackoverflow, Twitter (amoungst the developer community - granted you get same crappy spammy cpanel offerings every few minutes), highscalabiity etc..

    I think part of the blame falls on the hosting companies when innovative companies were pushing shared hosting to new limits (e.g. webfaction), paas (heroku, docker, cloud66), iaas (aws, rackspace cloud, railsmachine), most WHT companies were still resting on their laurels. For example, hanging on to cpanel (decorating the turd by switching some components - litespeed, cloudlinux, r1soft, mariadb, and calling it nextgen) or believing the LAMP stack was still the holy grail (because they read "facebook uses php"), or on a higher end believing that with half a dozen dedicated servers and an onapp license that could challenge AWS. tl;dr hosts got lazy, big or startup customers (i.e. those with horizontal scaling requirements) went elsewhere.

    Excluding resellers sitting on top of resellers, nowadays the majority of non-reseller punters that I can see are one-click WordPress users, or other off-shelf PHP apps, and if WHT does see any user that does scale it usually some clone file sharing site.

    There's still some great discussions here but mainly around colo, data-centers, bandwidth etc.. which are probably serving bigger customers through other avenues than WHT
    Last edited by MattF; 01-20-2014 at 11:13 PM.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_A View Post
    Unlimited offers might be "against the rules" however a few shared hosting providers disregard this "rule" and setup accounts with unlimited disk/bandwidth anyways, and offer it on their website. I won't list any names here, but yeah.
    They allow them now.

    I don't entirely disagree with the notion as most consumers who buy into the unlimited marketing don't know any better. They genuinely have no idea that their little low traffic Wordpress blog about their homemade dog bow-ties takes less than <150MB disk to store. But they don't want 'restricted' by real and practical limits.

    Though to be honest, offering these services are probably good for business. Lots of big name unlimited providers that can finally advertise on WHT whereas before they could not. The average 'unlimited hosting' customer just wants their stuff up and running and don't know any better. Most are burned by these sort of hosts eventually, which is why most hosts who offer these services try to push 1, 2 and 3 year hosting plans.
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  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by WireNine View Post
    I think the economy is more to blame for the trend not WHT.
    I really don't think its the economy if companies like Softlayer can pull out of here and add 2,400 customers in the last few months. They have one if not the highest prices in the industry.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by MattF View Post
    WHT audience isn't as large reaching as it should be, in age of startup fever you rarely see a mention of WebHostingTalk on HackerNews, /r/programming, Stackoverflow, Twitter (amoungst the developer community - granted you get same crappy spammy cpanel offerings every few minutes), highscalabiity etc..

    I think part of the blame falls on the hosting companies when innovative companies were pushing shared hosting to new limits (e.g. webfaction), paas (heroku, docker, cloud66), iaas (aws, rackspace cloud, railsmachine), most WHT companies were still resting on their laurels. For example, hanging on to cpanel (decorating the turd by switching some components - litespeed, cloudlinux, r1soft, mariadb, and calling it nextgen) or believing the LAMP stack was still the holy grail (because they read "facebook uses php"), or on a higher end believing that with half a dozen dedicated servers and an onapp license that could challenge AWS. tl;dr hosts got lazy, big or startup customers (i.e. those with horizontal scaling requirements) went elsewhere.

    Excluding resellers sitting on top of resellers, nowadays the majority of non-reseller punters that I can see are one-click WordPress users, or other off-shelf PHP apps, and if WHT does see any user that does scale it usually some clone file sharing site.

    There's still some great discussions here but mainly around colo, data-centers, bandwidth etc.. which are probably serving bigger customers through other avenues than WHT
    I agree this may have something to do with it. All I'm saying is that WHT fails to attract big customers like it used to. Everyone on here is looking for budget providers, unlike in the past, where there were legitimate companies seeking professional services.
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  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by WireNine View Post
    That's not against the rules of WHT, was changed over a year ago.



    I think the economy is more to blame for the trend not WHT.

    Economy and competition. Seven years ago when I started advertising on webhostingtalk, I used to post an offer thread and it would stay on the first page for 10 days, now its down to a few hours. With so much competition, prices are bound to decrease for the consumer.

    However, I think a majority of the problem comes from illegitimate businesses. New hosts trying to get in the business with no business experience and pricing themselves out of business, kid hosts who aren't interested in a living wage or long term solution, and scam businesses who sell annual plans or loads of low cost plans and then disappearing after 6 months or stop paying their providers until they get shut down.

  24. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by devonblzx View Post
    However, I think a majority of the problem comes from illegitimate businesses. New hosts trying to get in the business with no business experience and pricing themselves out of business, kid hosts who aren't interested in a living wage or long term solution, and scam businesses who sell annual plans or loads of low cost plans and then disappearing after 6 months or stop paying their providers until they get shut down.
    You hit the nail on the head my friend, may people in the industry these days are just trying to make a quick buck and will take any route to do so.

  25. #25
    WHT has nothing to do with the offers or prices of hosting companies. Like what others mentioned already, there are so many hosting companies out there so the competition is at the roof. I don't think WHT can do anything about it. Unless of course, you want the admins from WHT to try each of the hosting (which is virtually impossible).

    Large companies can offer much lower prices while small - medium companies tries to match this with quality of service.

    But then again, in my opinion WHT is greatly needed this time because this is the most popular place to find reviews or even get support from hosting companies.

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