How did these came to existence? Most of these offerings look basically identical. Is it ran by the same guy behind, or is it like a get rich quick network business stuff?

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IgorPartola 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some of these are resellers. Big provider sells them a package of 10-1000 VPSs and they set up websites to sell them to you. But you can also find lots of direct deals as well. BuyVM famously has their $15/year deal on a 1GB VPS. You can also often find dedicated servers for like $25/month. I recently bought a $75 lifetime deal on some email hosting for up to 25 domains and I think 250GB storage. Great for some secondary domains and such that I use. There are some real gems out there and you should see their Black Friday threads. Kind of a wild place.

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Imustaskforhelp 11 hours ago | parent [-]

There are lots of even cheaper deals than buyvm usually with racknerd and dedirock. Black friday deals are absolutely amazing but always go with someone a bit more reputed and Buyvm's an amazing choice too although they would be considered "pricey" in comparison to someone (just a few $'s) (I have joined their discord server)

I think racknerd recently did a 6.85$ or similar deal but the point of these deals become is that they become insanely overprovisioned and it becomes a showpiece of sorts "look what deal I got ;P" kinda not sure.

I think another fascinating deal about lowendtalk is that man those people have this faith in small hosting providers and giving chances to them etc. hoping that they become big as well. There are very few places like lowendtalk on the internet. I find a lot of similarities with the hackernews culture although more focused on deals/hosting although its definitely more casual than hackernews.

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IgorPartola 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling.

I used to get boxes from there for a specific product I had (ability to ping from multiple places around the globe to see what your latency was like) and one provider did burn me but the rest were pretty great.

I just wish more of them provided a proper native IPv6 stack. Still can’t understand why this isn’t standard for all.

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The weird thing is that it seems like some people are almost addicted to buying these boxes and I am not sure if the use cases. It almost has a feeling of gambling. Oh boy I had thought about this too. There are only quite a few uses of the completely cheap one. Perhaps for the chinese people, it acts as a VPN Like I thought about the use cases and they were hard for me to find when you consider all the "free" stuff that's launched too. I think to me, some aspects of lowend are for the novelty factor (oh a 2$ 1TB server sign me up!) and what ends up happening is that I didn't really use the storage much so my opinion was nice whereas someone else who used it said that, it's a bad deal You are right about this though, but still its just fascinating to find the deals and then like the fact is, they are still pretty small and you can just go talk to them and I think this customization and more discussion (hey does your product allow my usecase) etc. are some few reason I once asked on the forum why they aren't using hetzner,upcloud etc. and someone replied with the fact that they want to make the small one win. I don't think its completely gambling but you may end up buying something that you don't need much (I ended up with a netcup 8 gig server I guess) in a similar way. But now I kind of know that beating hetzner,ovh, (upcloud's more expensive) is possible perhaps but that if you want ton of servers fast and cheap, there is a possibility but I might still recommend companies like hetzner,ovh,upcloud etc. for any professional use, its just I would be thrown less under the bus as compared to if I have somebody idk set up in dedirock One of the reasons why I stopped frequenting lowendtalk, might go next black friday perhaps but I don't even know, like there are tons of services now which can offer vm's cheap and fast and just similar to what you might buy from that. There are tons of these I use so I don't really know if buying cheap servers might make sense One of the reasons I (liked?) the idea of buying cheap servers is that one can always scale when needed and they could then use something like these lowendproviders instead of vercel who initially might be free but then is super expensive. But I think that we are seeing some options which are free but not gonna be super expensive or that expensive perhaps. The thing is, to me, its nice knowing a place like lowendtalk exists. I might go into its rabbit hole again or not I guess but I don't really know.

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ksec 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

LowEndBox is as old as HN and has been doing VPS deals before the cloud took over. There are also deals offering for VPN services as well.

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toast0 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's some commercial software to sell/resell VPS, etc that some of these outfits use.

And it's pretty much a commodity business, so things are going to tend to look similar. If you're buying $5/month VPS, you don't want to pay for a lot of fluff. A lot of these are small time local hosters in a single location, but that's usually all you need for a small site.

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Imustaskforhelp 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Its usually WHMCS + virtfusion

There are alternatives but usually all just go use these for some reason

This is also why a lot of these websites might look similar as well.

	▲	tn1 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		WHMCS is probably the easiest batteries-included tool for the job, giving billing, management, and a customer support portal. These could be unbundled or reinvented but for your average hosting company there's no point in doing so.

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Imustaskforhelp 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be honest there is one instance that i know of where what ends up happening is that colocrossing a major vps provider does end up doing something like this (they used to be hosters/owners???? of lowendtalk/lowendbox)

Now another aspect is that the hosting economy is very mutual, they all start out somewhere and they are usually friendly towards each other. Most Hosting providers start out by either using reseller service directly or by colocating or by reselling dedicated servers which can be themselves of other providers

I don't know but the community is both cut throat and chill at the same time. It's strange to point this phenomenon but I think my point of their friendliness is something which depends and I don't know much about it but I once asked people on lowendtalk if I wanted to create a cloud provider myself and I got some responses and they were friendly so I am basing it off of that

Another aspect is that the market has already raced to the bottom super hard. Hetzner/OVH are really cheap, so to get even cheaper, you kinda have to be in the same pricing range I guess

Fun or not so fun fact but do you know that there have been cases of lowendbox providers to actually go shut down because they take these completely no profitable sense deal and actually lose money sometimes. VeloxMedia is a recent example of that and there is still controversy surrounding it.

There is also the fact that the scam industry in this department works as such:

Rent a really big server with lots of cores for a few months

Sell them unreasonably in LET for the year pricing or more

Then sell the company/be unable to provide/etc.

these I think are called as deadpools in the community.

Also regarding your comment behind same guy, there are sometimes family relations between people

as an example, racknerd I think is owned by the stepson of the owner of colocrossing and they I think using colocrossing themselves.

These have their own little drama stories and I think this is just the tip of iceberg as I just joined recently and probably digging through old archives.