The bottom line is the value/price ratio. We should all be working to add value. By any means necessary. The pitfall of low priced "services", is that it's hard to balance the support level and lower price for services. If Bluehost and lower end web hosters can completely do away with the support aspect, certainly SAAS can scale. But if a significant part of your value proposition is support, it's real hard to get down this low if any human is ever involved, and if you pay a living wage to your workers. I really expect at the ultra low end you have to be willing to do away with live support, and just provide a product that works....with no support. Would people want to buy a web host for $3.95 but if they engage support pay $15/hour for it? Perhaps that would work... but I think the value proposition gets skewed in this sense. Those customers paying this little likely needs support in a variety of ways. The challenge is to do it all right, so they don't... I agree with Bob, more likely they are subsidizing costs with investment and hoping to provide a profitable model in the future with enough market share. Bottom line, is the industry needs to be increasing value, because the flip side.... working for no profit, surviving off investment only... there's no end-game. You see this cycle time and time again as market share is grabbed, then underperforming companies are rolled up. In this process value is destroyed. Ultimately this is also why it's extremely damaging for investors to constantly invest in companies that don't make a profit, and don't provide a successful economical model for the services/products provided. These companies largely live on investor money, lose money, and in their wake destroy value for the entire industry. Of course the end-game for the investors is to make money... I'm always surprised how strong investment/gambles are for non-profitable companies. I guess there is no end to those with too much money that have to place that money somewhere. As the rich get richer, there will only be more dumb money cheapening the value proposition. After all, who needs value when you have willing investors. Bottom line is that if it's not worth doing... then maybe it should not be done. Maybe the race to the bottom is not worth it. Maybe investments that lose value for an industry should be limited. The giant pool of money is now weaponized. -Kiriki -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Bob Evans Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 5:20 PM To: Robert Webb Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: Bluehost.com For an ISP type service - it's almost impossible the make it up in volume - all you need is one phone call to cost you $10 in support on a $3.50 service. With that many customers you can imagine how many call to just ask what happened or vent after the event is over. I founded a cable modem business prior to docsis standard. Call center with 150 people in it. People would call for help with their printer just because we answered the phone. So support for a $3.49 web service must make compromises somewhere in an attempt to reach profitability. I know of 3 very big ISPs - all barely making money for years. Providing crummy service , priced cheaply and expecting to make it up in volume. Their solution was to merge and lose money together. Still providing a lowball price for service , they then took the profitable parts of the business and sold those to others so they can re-org and improve cash momentarily. The re-org produced the same low prices and crummy service. So it's a cycle some people play just to win money from hedge funds, investors and finally the public. What do they call it when one keeps doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result ? Low priced services are difficult to make profitable - if you drove your car the way most low priced business services operate you would have a car that top speeds at the minimal freeway speed, wouldnt carry a a spare tire, drive around until the empty light turns on and carry as little insurance as possible. - Gee, come to think of it, I've been in an airport shuttle van like that in new york. Thank You Bob Evans CTO
However, with thousands more users at that price point, you would think the income would be plenty for better services.
Who makes more, the store with smaller quantities at higher prices or the store that sells more bulk at lower prices? Perception of value, I believe, wins.
Robert
On Wed, 25 Nov 2015 16:00:37 -0800 "Bob Evans" <bob@FiberInternetCenter.com> wrote:
Yes, I agree with you Joe - a hasty generalization, as "you get what you pay for" doesn't really apply to as many goods in the same way it does to almost all services. However, a $3.49 web site service should have be a good first clue.
Thank You Bob Evans CTO
Walmart has cheap prices so "you get what you pay for."?? Hasty generalization but I can't disagree 100% with your opinion on this one. I am learning about the non-profit world of IT and the challenges are all around me. :)
-- Later, Joe
On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Bob Evans <bob@fiberinternetcenter.com> wrote:
Gee, for $3.49 for a website hosting per month , it's a real bargain. While the network person inside me says, Wow that's a long outage. The other part of me is really wondering what one thinks they can really expect from a company that hosts a website for just $3.49 ? Such a bargain at less than 1/2 the price of a single hot dog at a baseball stadium per month. That price point alone tells you about the setup and what you are agreeing too and who it's built for. Goes along with the ol' saying, "you get what you pay for."
If they are down for 10 hours a month out of the average 720 hours in a month - thats a tiny percentage 1-2 of the time it's unavailable - in service terms of dollars it's roughly a nickel they credit each customer. Do I need more coffee or is my math wrong about a nickel for 10 hours of website hosing ?
However, maybe that is all many companies /sites really need. In which case, it should be easy enough to build in backup yourself using two cheap hosing providers and flip between them when the need arises. Or pick a provider that manages their routing well and works with you quickly, but, you'll have to pay more for that.
Yep, the math spells it out - "you get what you pay for."
Thank You Bob Evans CTO
remember folks, redundancy is the savior of all f***ups.
:)
On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 2:21 PM, JoeSox <joesox@gmail.com> wrote:
I just waited 160 minutes for a tech call and the Bluehost tech told me he was able to confirm that it wasn't malicious activity that took down the datacenter but rather it was caused by a "datacenter issue". So my first thought is someone didn't design the topology correctly or something. Some of our emails are coming thru but Google DNS still lost all of our DNS zones which are hosted by Bluehost. At least the #bluehostdown is fun to read :/ -- Later, Joe
On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 08:41:55AM -0800, JoeSox > <joesox@gmail.com> wrote a message of 9 lines which said: > > > Anyone have the scope on the outage for Bluehost? > > https://twitter.com/search?q=%23bluehostdown&src=tyah > > The two name servers ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com are awfully > slow to respond: > > % check-soa -i picturemotion.com ns1.bluehost.com. > 74.220.195.31: OK: 2012092007 (1382 ms) > ns2.bluehost.com. > 69.89.16.4: OK: 2012092007 (1388 ms) > > As a result, most clients timeout. > > May be a DoS against the name servers? > > bluehost.com itself is DNS-hosted on a completely different > architecture. So it works fine. But the nginx Web site replies 502 > Gateway timeout, probably overloaded by all the clients trying to get > informed. > > The Twitter accounts of Bluehost do not distribute any useful > information. >