A Short Rant About Hosting

Post by andrewf » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 1:46 AM UTC

tshtf wrote: post #8

citricsquid wrote: post #5

Softlayer are great at this. Their sites lists prices over $1200 but talk to sales and you can get it close to cut in half and if you order enough servers you'll get it at 75% discount. I guess the value of sales staff knowing about the customer is quite high.

So anyone who wants servers needs to talk with sales and negotiate a discount? I think the point of this post was: Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time. When comparing between hosting providers, most lack the time and resources to negotiate with each provider to find out what the "real" rate is.…

Post by Goladus » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 2:07 AM UTC

pmcginn wrote: post #22

ethank wrote: post #3

"Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time." My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased). We'd get pricing estimates that c…

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

Post by drivingmenuts » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 2:35 AM UTC

pmcginn wrote: post #22

ethank wrote: post #3

"Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time." My god that is good. I spent two weeks about three years ago going around the country looking at data centers to move our systems to (30+ servers that were currently in a co-lo and we were looking to go to managed/leased). We'd get pricing estimates that c…

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

Post by zer0point » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 2:50 AM UTC

Goladus wrote: post #23

pmcginn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people think a spreadsheet is less likely to rip them off than a person? I mean, sure, if you want to, feel free to walk into a car dealership and pay sticker price. Go to the mall and buy that hardcover book at MSRP.

You can always try to negotiate the sticker price if you want. Even if there's no sales staff there's someone who should have the authority to offer you a discount, though in a market like shared hosting that's probably not going to happen much.

Post by jacques_chester » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 3:09 AM UTC

utunga wrote: post #10

As someone who runs both AWS and my own dedicated servers I'm starting to see a pattern.. MBA types talk about 'new trends', 'data centric startups' and new opportunities opened up by AWS and such. OTOH practical advice from real people with successful startups - marco arment, jakewalker, others, seems to focus more on the unseen problems of virtual and advantages of just getting your own server. Am I right?