Quote:
Originally Posted by adultbandwidth
Exactly. Some customers find value in leasing equipment, but our management had assumed that larger adult webmasters would have already made the investment in equipment and would be colocating in neutral facilities such as the ones that we are in... which is why we structured this as a bandwidth promotion so that you could obtain rack space through us or through the facility directly and simply buy bandwidth from us via cross-connect.
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Not a slam of you or your management, but clearly they don't know much about adult if they assumed that. Most of the people here, even alot of the big guys, are still on leased, fully managed dedicated servers. People that should be on dedicated servers are still on shared hosting and buying VPS plans "reseller" accounts and crap like that.
To be honest with you, I have alot of respect for anyone that tries to make money in hosting and catering to an adult client base because any profit you earn you are gonna work your ass off for. Adult webmasters for the most part are extremely cheap and extremely short sighted when it comes to things like webhosting. They buy only the capacity they need today, rarely have things like warm standby boxes or distributed networks or databases that are replicated across multiple DCs and multiple boxes and often take the way out that offers the smallest up front investment.
I left shared hosting years ago. I think I had my first leased dedicated when I was 14 or so. I colo'd my first a few years later when I finally learned about the leased hardware game. It all started when I wanted another hard drive and they wanted $400 plus $20 a month for it and I said "Hey, wait a minute, I can buy one for $500, why don't I just buy it and send it to you, and you put it in?" and they said no and I started thinking about it. I started looking and said "Hey, I can build a 1U box for $6K with three times the specs of this thing and then I can pay $100 a month instead of $350 a month and then at the end of it all I can eBay the box and still get something for it, and the box will last me five years and while granted towards the end of those five years it will be underpowered and be relegated from production to shit like development box, mail server, file server, offsite backup server, etc, it will still be so much cheaper in the long run!" and while granted this was several years ago back when hardware cost much more (today you can build a kickass 1U for $3K) the general principle still applies.
The other thing is if you run on LAMP, you don't need to waste money on a "fully managed server" because there isn't much that can go wrong with a LAMP box. The biggest part of running and securing LAMP boxes is keeping stuff up to date and patched and I am sorry, but you don't need a fucking tech team to do it. You can teach yourself how to do it and if you spend a couple of hundred dollars on books from Amazon you can save yourself probably a few million dollars in admin fees over the course of a lifetime. Adult webmasters love to waste money on fully managed LAMP servers, too.
Part of this all goes back to the point that most adult webmasters mismanage the money that comes into their companies and spend quite alot buying drinks and whores at shows and not nearly enough keeping up with their business, because if they buy friends at the shows they are cool and they somehow think they are successful.
Everyone on here likes to cry "My host this" and "my host that", and so they switch hosts alot. The real problem is not their hosts, its the fact that they are trying to run a million dollar a year company off two shared hosting accounts and a couple of Plesk reseller accounts.
Your presence here may be a good thing for the industry. Maybe give people the kick in the ass they need to move into the real world and host their shit themselves and reliability as a whole would probably increase as a result of it.