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Thread: Corporate memberships going up
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02-10-2015, 06:46 PM #101Web Hosting Master
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True, you will never be able to offer assurances or guarantees, hosts will still go down the chute as they always have in every sector of business when they were seemingly doing ok.
But something that most seem to agree on is simply that the client quality from WHT is pretty much **** these days and getting worse.
WHT has lost most of it's quality and it's getting worse all the time, also agreed from most that the Corporate membership really offers little benefit especially for the increased cost coming.
The truth here is that more and more are giving that badge up so the cost is being increased to compensate.
The cost of being a paying member is increasing, the quality of the posting population and client base is decreasing.
Something needs to give. Little has changed here over many years, we keep hearing "tell us what you want" but seeing nothing returned.
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02-10-2015, 07:09 PM #102
Part of the issue is all the providers that have only enough time to post things like "what's your budget" and include a signature. That in itself is harming the quality of the forum. Self inflicted.
There's a host of hosts, and more starting up all the time. The new ones think they need to compete on price. $1 year for unlimited they can't deliver and hooray, we're a business! The more that offer those, the more that show up to buy those. No checking, just "who's cheapest?". They either turn out to be fraud/spammers/scammers or the "host" does. Forum quality suffers as a result, as does customer quality.
Not what I'd call a result of anything we've done, other than being popular enough to attract so many new "hosts" that it's harming things.Your one stop shop for decentralization
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02-10-2015, 07:20 PM #103Poooooonnyyy :*
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WHT isn't at fault since WHT doesn't run any hosting brands. If WHT ran a half dozen cages and sold servers that fed on those bottom feeders, then sure, they'd be at least partially at fault.
There's been a comment/request a few times now where people said 'make people hide their sigs in the VPS/webhosting discussion sections', just to see how many people would still take part.
I wouldn't doubt a very large portion of WHT's traffic is inbound search engine hits, so the admins/owners going HAM on some of these sections isn't going to really hurt the community, if anything it'd probably help curb where some of the market has been heading.
That's my take on it at least
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02-10-2015, 07:22 PM #104Web Hosting Master
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Indeed, however one of more obvious ways of tackling some of this has been suggested several times over the years and again here.
For normal members, you can post in the offers section less frequently, perhaps once or twice a month, premium more so and corporate more so again. Thinning out the offers in this way will generate more income from memberships but those $1 hosts won't be able to afford that investment and thus we will see them less frequently.
Of course that will not necessarily increase the number of quality providers or sensible offers but thinning out the crud is a necessary evil to reward the paying membership for longer visibility of their offers.
I still believe that value in terms of posts is driven by the community view. A reputation system where people can add or subtract is a valuable thing more especially for a forum like this.
If your next post is "Hi, good luck with finding your new host" and that gets down voted several times because it was clearly just a signature spam then those people will soon learn to stop doing that.
You don't want red banners next to your username that says people don't rate you posts and you especially don't want it visible beside your name in an offer thread.
Never mind reporting everything you see, let the community vote on whether a post has value. The whole thumbs up thing was a waste of time and effort.
Edit:
And of course it provides the incentive for people to post interesting, informative and useful posts to get a better reputation which increases quality levels and feels like a reward to get people up voting your posts.Last edited by ~Lee~; 02-10-2015 at 07:35 PM.
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02-10-2015, 07:56 PM #105Web Hosting Guru
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Common gripe I hear is the QUALITY of customers that are generated from WHT leads. There are issues with buy-in amounts, short retention, high fraud/abuse. Much of this is VPS specific.
The $3k a month pin stick is more suitable for dedis or colo in my opinion, but I haven't a clue of the prices for different categories.
Do the math on VPS income even on managed plans, stick it with 3 month retention to be kind. Even if squeezing $20 out on profit side, talking about 50 signups to break even on 3 month retention. $20 profit is way gracious for most and 3 month retention is becoming more uncommon.
Issue remains that WHT runs an open market and no great advantage in membership aside from greater frequency in ad posting - for most. More is NOT better, in opposite actually, and this applies to members and non members - to everyone posting offers.
Companies need to step up their offers. Better messaging, better offers (not just cheaper) and keep things fresh. I see survival re-posting of ads all the time and lots of ads that just very flawed / unprofessional. Discouraging heated comments on the ads also encourages more of the bad behavior by bad hosts.
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02-10-2015, 08:00 PM #106Web Hosting Guru
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This is a very valid point. I point you to the vpsBoard folks and their screening for Verified Status (which is free, but has some benefits):
https://vpsboard.com/topic/127-becom...fied-provider/
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02-10-2015, 08:30 PM #107Web Hosting Master
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Interesting thread. Has that old time WHT feel about it.
Didn't know Dennis was getting off the horse hanging up his guns. All the best with those health issues Dennis. Our body is an amazing machine, but not so much fun when things start malfunctioning!!
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02-10-2015, 10:54 PM #108Web Hosting Master
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^^^^^^ That's it right there...and that's why some things slide a little. Saying it in the nicest way without being sent to the corner
Put the onus on the person signing up. The music industry has a similar approach and has been in place from when I started.....in 1993...and that was for a small project. Who knows how long they had that process beforehand.
I know it sounds simple...but the paperwork we had to fill out....let's just say you had to put aside 48 hours or more to make sure it was all correct. If you really want access to those resources, one WILL put aside those 48+ hours to fill out the forms....BUT...now those forms are online...to fill out for free (or you could still do the paper method for $25).
It's basic questions like;
Artist/Group Name (Host company name)
Members (people running the host)
Based (where is your company located)
Type of music/genre (what are selling shared, vps, servers, etc)
Performances ( where are your servers or accounts located)
Estimate of how many cd's sold (estimate of customers)
**** This could also include searching the forum to see if there's been any complaints about this company.
I don't remember all the questions, but fly-by nights wouldn't be able to fill out the form...and if they did, they would get a polite response saying why they were not accepted. For instance needing to have performed for 2 years and you only did a year and 3 months. Contact us later and we will review your application.
Also...applications took 6-8 weeks to process. A serious artist WILL wait those 6-8 weeks. If a company is serious about hosting, they WILL wait 6-8 weeks. 6-8 weeks is a miniscule fraction of time if your running a company...and those weeks really fly by......of course if you're "running a company" when your 17, 6-8 weeks would still feel like a lifetime. The point of running or opening a company is to have something sustainable for many years. Plus the submissions really took a few minutes to verify.
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02-18-2015, 02:52 PM #109~~~~
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New color on corp membership username... good? bad? opinions/ideas?
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02-18-2015, 03:58 PM #110Poooooonnyyy :*
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02-18-2015, 04:46 PM #111Web Hosting Master
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02-18-2015, 07:41 PM #112Web Hosting Master
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02-18-2015, 09:44 PM #113Disabled
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02-19-2015, 12:02 AM #114Web Hosting Guru
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I like it...
Respectfully,
Mr. Terrence
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02-19-2015, 01:03 AM #115
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02-19-2015, 08:08 AM #116Top-Notch Hosting
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02-19-2015, 01:15 PM #117Disabled
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02-19-2015, 01:35 PM #118Web Hosting Master
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I like the new colour!
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02-19-2015, 01:41 PM #119Web Hosting Master
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02-19-2015, 04:27 PM #120Junior Guru Wannabe
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In Offers section a simple note like "[CORPORATE]"(in orange colour) before actual advertisement title could bring a lot more attention. I am currently happy with my Premium membership and I post ads every 6-7 days, I only hope my company and other non-corporate companies won't be buried after Corporate's get their features.
I know this won't happen, but Corporate membership pricing should be based on company income. I believe no big and stable business/company will have problem paying additional 20%, while small businesses/companies will be hit the most with that percentage. I a have feeling like all those who want more features, can actually pay additional 20% and still generate good profit, but they want everything handed to them.
I don't mean to offend anyone, this is just my honest opinion.
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02-19-2015, 04:41 PM #121Poooooonnyyy :*
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By marking 'corporate' in the title/etc you're more or less making the Corporate badge a mark of trust/etc from WHT.
Basing it on income is also silly. Why should I pay more to have the same access as someone else? Not only do many of the newer hosts go hardcore deep discounts to try to cover their dues, now we're stuck paying 20% more than them too?
It's a very fast way to bleed memberships and completely devalue what little we get with corp already.
Since the new owners are doing this purely as a business thing and not to 'better the community' (no one wants your 'new' features, we still dont have the old ones we were promised and been paying for years for), then the new owners should do right by the corporate's and make it worth it to have.
Chop back non membership users heavily to 4 weeks, push premiums back to 8 - 10 days, push corps back to 4 days.
It chops back the mountain of offers that get dumped in there and gives us some value in our new found price increases.
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02-19-2015, 04:47 PM #122~~~~
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This is very true, the only one real value of Corp Membership is the lesser time between advertising posts... but this is all buried under mountains of other posts.
A new structure in time between posts for normal/premium/corp would indeed be a great thing and would increase the value of the Corp Membership.Uptime Monitor - Minimize your downtime by being the first to know about it!
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02-19-2015, 04:49 PM #123Poooooonnyyy :*
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That's all any corporate's want. I'm positive the amount of corp's signing up for word alerts is extremely low, if non existent.
The only other feature I'd love to see is the company accounts one but that got rolled out and into a trash bin within the same week.
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02-19-2015, 04:52 PM #124
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02-19-2015, 04:53 PM #125Poooooonnyyy :*
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Company accounts?
That ones been promised/hinted/etc for ages.
We sent an email for it way back in the day and were told the only person that's able to enable it was on vacation and given i've seen no one else with it, it's safe to assume it's not prime time ready like the roll out hinted.
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