Not another (green) hosting forum?!?

BikeGremlin

So, this ~~morning~~ dawn, Amar hit me with a Facebook (yes, I know) message. Damn, I am an early bird, but at that time of day, I only get spam hits from bitcoin sellers dressed up as American single moms. To make the matters worse and even more suspicious - he didn't sound drunk, so I feared that something bad had happened (the power of negative thinking, I should write a self-help book on that).

Nope, it turned out it was a moment of inspiration. He had set up this place and wanted to share the joy. 🙂 My first thought was:

Why, God, WHY?!?

We already have WebHostingTalk (WHT link), LowEndTalk (LET link), and LowEndSpirit (LES link). Why create another forum?

I think that forums are great - a lot better than social networks, because they are not corporate-owned (and censored), but they can be(come) a real community. And they are better for sharing knowledge - with their structured topics and search options. I mean: good luck trying to find your post from a few years ago on Linkedin.

However, dividing the community into many separate forums is not ideal. That is the main reason why, on my (mostly cycling-related) websites, I direct people to bikeforums.net (for English) and 2bike.rs forum for my Serbocroatian-speaking countrymen.

Amar said he wanted to build something nice and watch it grow. That's something I've experienced and can relate to. But what about the other forum members? Why would anyone join this place? What is the Hosting Forums' leitmotif?

Those were the questions Amar answered in an email. It, boils down to making a LES-like community (healthy, positive, and uncensored), but focusing on quality, not only on (dirt)cheap offers. In other words, this is sort of a mix between the WHT (but without the outrageously nonsense moderating policy) and LES (but without the, in my opinion, unrealistically low max. price limits for high-quality hosting).

Makes sense, it's worth a shot, so I agreed to help get this up and running and take a share of the administration/moderation load.

And here we are. 🙂

Welcome to Hosting Forums.

Relja Novović

Amadex

#60a96d forums to the moon! 🚀

Chris

I've been calling for this type of setup - LES but without the scam-level pricing!

Wishing you every success and if I can help in any way - (except time commitments - LOL) then feel free to ask!

Amadex

Chris hey, welcome! 😊

BikeGremlin

Chris

It's a child of ~~love and enthusiasm~~ two Balcan idiots - we'll se if it lives. 🙂

MikeDVB

Moo. 😉

BikeGremlin

MikeDVB

Hey Mike,
Welcome!
It's great to see you here. 🙂

Ympker

Thanks for inviting me over @BikeGremlin 🙂
This looks like it's gonna be a nice place. Not only judging by the management personnel, but also by the type of people this place aims to attract and cater to. Furthermore, as a freelance webdesigner I welcome a move away grom bottom-barrel pricing which was one of the reasons I said goodbye to Fiverr.

Good luck with this project! 🙂

Chris

Ympker yeah - unfortunately the lowend markets are stuck in their lowend ways!

That being said, some fabulous people there will hopefully benefit from a fresh community with a wider scope of services available other than the same 3 scammers on each one 🤣

evnix

This is exciting,
all the very best with the new project!! I really hope this succeeds 🙂

Chris the same 3 scammers on each one 🤣

I fear they will come here too once this forum gets a bit more traction.

Chris

evnix at least they should be diluted with good offers from decent hosts!

I'd recommend reading Bike Gremlins blog for some good tips! I avoid self promotion on forums as it makes advice seem biased- I can categorically say LES, as much as I love the people, the community and the conversation is shooting itself in the foot by limiting itself to ponzi scheme pricing - I have high hopes this place can become the missing space in the industry provided it focuses on serving the members, not the people paying them and its exactly what I planned to do up until I saw these guys giving it a go!

BikeGremlin

Chris

Similar thoughts about the offers ("dilluted" is a nice way to put it 🙂 ).

And about the basic idea.

LES is stuck with a budget apparently. That's fine. What I think is wrong (and I said it there publicly so no problem repeating it here) is the limit's amount. It's too low for fair, decent quality offers.

I hope LES thrives - great community spirit. If at least 50% of that keeps living here, this too will be a great place to be. But I find the business end of LES to be rather limiting. Even for budget stuff (unless it's low quality).

Though, it's always possible to change those limits. We'll see what happens. I hope for the best - both for LES and HostingForums. They are better than other alternatives I know about (won't name any).

Chris

BikeGremlin I was saying a very similar thing in the Virtfusion discord yesterday actually!

evnix

BikeGremlin Though, it's always possible to change those limits

Just a thought, instead of defining a price, why not put certain requirements on the service provided,

for example:

you can have RAID0 web hosting offers on other forums, but you need RAID6 to post an offer here.
There are no SLA requirements on other forums, you need to have a basic SLA in your terms to post here.
Requirement to post the avg. ticket response time.

Btw, the other forums already do that, for example: no unlimited offers, but the requirements are very low or bare minimum.

I feel we should define the minimum quality standards, the webhosts can adjust their price/service according to that,
this way it won't be a race to the bottom.

BikeGremlin

evnix

That is an interesting thought. Defining the service quality minimum acceptable level. As opposed to setting a maximum pricing level (as is the case on LET and LES).

Now I'll sound like one of those guys who come up with a problem for every solution, 🙂 but here are my thoughts on that:

It's not easy to objectively define quality.
A guy wrote a whole book on that (Amazon affiliate link).

Let's take ticket response time for example. That's a simple, straight forward metrics, right? Well - I'm sure we've all had experience with tech. support that responds with "thank you, we'll look into it" or, even when you clearly explain the symptoms and what you tried in order to resolve them, you get "try to reset your computer/modem."

So, maybe we could track and compare ticket response time. But what happens if I post a ticket and go for a ride - while the support needs some further action and/or approval from me in order to proceed?

It's very difficult to objectively quantify hosting quality. And if we decide to be subjective - I've seen some really bad providers perceived as good by some people. And vice-versa for some good providers.

We also should not forget that quality changes over time. HostMantis is one example of a great service gone bad in a few months' time. And there are a few examples of the opposite. It's impossible for even a team of people to keep a track of all that.

What I think is reasonable to achieve is to just weed out the obvious frauds, and share personal experience with the good providers. Maybe I'm too idealistic and still naive, but I believe that in a healthy community, the good ones will be known and stand out, over time.

evnix

BikeGremlin It's not easy to objectively define quality.

BikeGremlin you get "try to reset your computer/modem."

Thanks for putting this together, and you make a lot of sense and thanks for providing those examples.

Serious businesses have actually found a good middleground to the problem, and that is SLAs, I use a lot of AWS services and if you look at their SLAs, I know I get my money back if they don't perform and also they lose a lot of money from a lot of customers if they don't perform.

https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/?aws-sla-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.serviceNameLower&aws-sla-cards.sort-order=asc&awsf.tech-category-filter=*all

My first Lowend VPS back in 2011 had an SLA and as a teenager back then, I was so happy to get the VPS free for a month whenever there was a downtime 🙂 I never complained about the downtime because of that and it kept the host on their toes.

Most of the jobs I have had were in industries with strong SLAs, I remember preparing weeks in advance so that we won't have more than 10 mins of downtime during a server software upgrade.

Whereas If you look at threads in other forums, you have people complaining about how many weeks or months their servers were down for with no replies or recourse and for me personally, it is absolutely heartbreaking to see how other people gang up and make fun of their situation.

May be we should make having an SLA along with the price mandatory here, however weak or non existent it is should not be a problem and have hosts compete on how strong their SLA is.

Just throwing some ideas out there for brainstorming 🙂

BikeGremlin

evnix

Yeah - more info and more ideas don't hurt.

Regarding SLA - if some of the sites I run go down for an hour, or a day, money back doesn't make it good.
But I agree it's a bare minimum to expect from a hosting service provider.

I'll discuss that idea with @Amadex

It's worth considering. Though, in my experience from the way things are generally run in my country (Serbia) - with corrupt people/management, a ton of rules doesn't cut it - there's always a loophole to be found and abused.

So it always boils down to reputation and trust - and that takes years to build.

Amadex

VirMach has downtime sometimes 30+ days 😄

BikeGremlin

Amadex

Virmach servers don't do downtime - they take a sabbatical!

🙂