On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:06:03AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
We pay what our providers think they can get away with. Like most pricing decisions, they're not based on any "technical logic", they're based on what the market will bear. Feel free to turn the process around -- decide what the service is worth to you, tell the provider of the service that price, and let them decide if they want to provide it to you at that price. Don't be too surprised if you get monkeys in exchange for your peanuts, though.
Are you suggesting that you get worse service after you negotiate a better deal with a particular provider? I mean, certainly the different providers have different levels of quality, but my experience has been that with a particular provider, you get the same service regardless of how well you negotiated, assuming you eventually came to an agreement. (quite often, in fact, I see the customer that asks for more... quite often gets more, without paying more. We've all had that 'difficult customer' that consumes far more support hours than what they pay could possibly buy. Quite often, that same customer negotiated a better deal, too. It's a cost of selecting for customers that are good at negotiation that most businesspeople don't take into account.) Back to negotiating for initial prices: as far as I can tell, this is largely a matter of knowing the market. The high initial prices are there so that the people that are unable or unwilling to put in the effort to find what the real market prices are pay a lot more. I know as my own business has progressed? the prices I pay even for the same unit of commodities that don't fall in price (like rack space) goes down fairly dramatically every year, simply because I understand the market better.