[esamatti]

Interesting business model

----------

Experts Host Sites Here for $1/month

Do you like paying extra so other people can ask amateur questions? That's how it is at other hosting companies where beginners and experts pay the same price. Beginners drive up the cost by asking a lot of novice support questions while the experts don't contact support. That is great for amateurs, and unfair to the experts like you.

No Support Linux Hosting has a completely different business model. We ignore the support questions, and pass the savings on to you! If you are an expert who does not want to pay extra for help with amateur support issues, then you can host with us and save big money.

Experts like you can sign up now for free. We charge $1/month per website, and there is no limit to the number of websites you can host in your account. This is the best deal in the web hosting industry, as long as you are the type of person who can find his or her own answers.

-----------

From https://web.archive.org/web/20201109042643/https://www.nosup...

I guess they took savings from security too.

[IgorPartola]

For those interested in this kind of thing, there are two fun resources I would recommend. First, LowEndBox (https://lowendbox.com/) which documents where you can get VPS hosting for as little as $1/month or even cheaper in some instances. Second, Super Dimensional Fortress (http://sdf.org/) where for a $1 you can get lifetime low level hosting and for $25 you can get access to a much beefier server. A community of old school *nix nerds comes as a bonus.

[dannyw]

Just watch out: lots of the low end box providers end up shutting down, and may take your servers and data with it.

I now stick to reputable “value” providers like BuyVM. Having an operator I can discord and get frank answers, as well as a commitment to privacy (Tor exit nodes welcomed), is nice.

[EricE]

>and may take your servers and data with it.

Only if you let them.

Do people seriously NOT perform backups via independent methods utterly independent of their primary cloud service provider?

No one remembers Photobucket or the hundreds of other cloud services that went "poof" into the night?

There is no cloud, just someone else's computer - always have backups of some other means. A different provider with a different account, alternate mechanisms (i.e. email addresses with different email providers, etc.) to get to that data and accounts...

It's even easier now with VM's, snapshots, free open source backup software that understands all of that - fairly inexpensive commercial solutions like veem - there is zero excuse.

My favorite was a small SAAS provider that had all their backup infrastructure on AWS under the same account as the test/dev and operations - and someone got in and deleted it all. Partitioning - yes, it's an essential thing. And not just for technical. Separation of duties. Requiring concurrence by more than one person for critical operations. Lessons that should have been learned from past experience.

Peoples (especially developers) eyes glaze over with documents like NIST 800-53 - but all those controls exist from experience. The bigger/more critical your system is to your survival, the more of those controls you should have answers for!

[renewiltord]

Honestly, they generally don't go poof. I remember I had a VPS for more than 10 years with Hetzner. No poofing till they had to get rid of that offering. I have the backups but I think now I prefer just running on GKE + RDS for funsies. Costs a bunch (like $50/mo) but I don't have to worry about anything.

And fuck me if I'm ever writing a BIND zonefile ever again.

[qeternity]

> GKE + RDS

Uh what? Really?

This doubles your failure surface.

[renewiltord]

True, but I only need two nines. It's my personal stuff.

[klodolph]

This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client).

For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.

[tacon]

lowendbox.com was great to start, but they got popular, and then profitable, and finally were bought by a low end hosting aggregator/rollup, and now almost all the different offers on lowendbox.com are coming from essentially the same company. The sister site, lowendtalk.com, seems to have picked up the mantle of open discussions, and they have offers, too. For example, recently I bought a 1GB KVM VPS for $14.83/yr. With KVM, I can use netboot.xyz and play to my hearts content with any Linux distro I want. I have NixOS running on it at the moment. On another, I'm playing with dokku, which takes over the whole VPS as a heroku clone.

These companies are often unstable, so regular backups of anything you might be sad losing are vital. I recommend paying by the month, if that is available, and using this whitelist of low end providers who have been in business for a reasonable length of time[0].

[0] https://lowendboxes.review/the-whitelist/

[jart]

I'm so glad Super Dimensional Fortress is still around. I learned how to use Unix thanks to them back in the 1990s. They're in a different league than the goofballs selling unlimited web hosting cheaper than arizona iced tea.

[zepatrik]

Just had a good 2h read on internet history.

[TedDoesntTalk]

This. sdf.org is awesome.

[cromka]

And their VPN service is a steal!

[boarnoah]

Definitely be careful with hosts off Lowendbox, as other commenters have mentioned providers go offline without warning all the time. Never pay more than a year in advance etc...

Notorious for "Deadpooling", providers sell ultra cheap hosts. Run them on over-provisioned servers for a year or two and disappear overnight.

ex: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/08/1549222/20-low-end-...

[lupire]

Also nearlyfreespeech.net is old and cheap and doesn't police legal content.

[jodrellblank]

> "doesn't police legal content."

What does that mean - what would it mean to "police legal content"?

[SkyBelow]

I think the claim is that anything clearly legal is allowed. The problem is how iffy 'clearly' legal is. First, which country's law are we using? Second, which court rulings are we applying? Anything controversial ceases to be clearly legal because the police can go after it. Even if a well funded defense will eventually win the case, it may be on appeals meaning that punishment for the content has already begun. Thus it becomes easy to justify anything controversial as not being fully legal.

And that's assuming they'll actually try to stick to their claim. I find that isn't the case when it is really put to the test.

[jodrellblank]

I get it, I was reading "police" too literally; police enforce the law, so how can you have only legal content and describe that as "not policing"? And if you have only legal content, of course you don't police it because that's redundant. "We don't filter the filtered water" you must because that's how you get filtered water, but you don't because you already have done so and it doesn't need doing again.

Un-moderated, or "we have no content policy or acceptable use policy separate from the law".

[retrac]

From the context, I assume they mean kick you off the service for publishing something the hoster disagrees with.

[newen]

Topical example is Parler getting shut down by AWS for whatever reason Amazon gave.

[seneca]

Knowingly breaking guidelines here, with apologies, but why in the world is this downvoted? It's an accurate and timely example.

[jfengel]

Saying "whatever reason Amazon gave" is a pretty good reason to downvote it. Amazon gave reasons. If you can cite them, then you can disagree with them. But to simply wave those reasons away as "whatever" is intended to convey "that was obviously legal content being shut down for purely ideological reasons", and that is simply not the case.

The "reason Amazon gave" was "content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens", with examples given in:

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

So it's a bad example of something being dismissed for ideological reasons, and a bad example of something whose reasons can be assumed when the answer was easily available.

That's an excellent reason to downvote something. It's simply not accurate.

[mobilio]

It's better to get something even free like AwardSpace (https://www.awardspace.com)

[jcun4128]

> SDF

cool name (know the show)

I'll have to check these out I've been using OVH all this time, also GitHub pages is pretty cool.

[abdullahkhalids]

NearlyFreeSpeech, where I have been hosting my static personal site for 9 years has a similar model. You pay for exactly the resources you use. I pay less than $20/year.

If you need support, you pay $5/month extra.

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/support

[pas]

How come support is not pay-as-you-go based on time?

[l-lousy]

“Why did it take you so long to answer my question” , “I just wanted a quick answer why are you charging me for 20 minutes of support”. Human time spent on support is not as cut and dry as hosting resources used, so I imagine it’s easier to not have that discussion. Also 5$ would be like 15 mins of any qualified persons time, so really you’re not paying much.

[Zenst]

>Also 5$ would be like 15 mins of any qualified persons time, so really you’re not paying much.

Be less minutes than that I dare say. $20 an hour tech costs, then you have overheads and that's without a profit margin. I'd say 5 mins be more closer to the mark. Really gets down to how many support calls you have as if you have a couple admins who have to dip into a support queue, then their hourly rate would be higher. However if you have a nice frontline 1st line support pool with 2nd and 3rd for escalation model/scale then it will get cheaper.

That all said you have to factor in how much support they use and maybe your average user will need one or two tickets a year and then at the other end you the types who fail to read FAQ's and end up needing more support to use their computer, let alone the service and blur the lines contacting you for an issue that after some back and forth turns out to be the user's end. Those will be costly. So you balance things out - and go with the average and yet at the same time, dread some types of customers.

[pronlover723]

Just price it like Microsoft. $499 per incident.

[UncleMeat]

I'd wager that qualified support staff would get paid well over $20/h. Plus there is all sorts of business overhead.

[kazen44]

from experience, i can tell you high end support far exceeds $20/h (think 3rd level network and systems support). $20/h is more in the 1st line territory.

[h_anna_h]

I presume that you are all talking about SV, right?

[smitop]

They tried that at one point, and it didn't work out very well for them: https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2013/12/27/member_support_...

[jodrellblank]

> "Paid support must be opt-in. Whatever we do with paid support should have no effect on the 80-95% of people who don’t use it."

I assume that includes "when the tech has no tickets, they /do not/ work on anything that would improve the service for everyone"?

> "Essentially, if you want support, you’re not really paying for the answer to a question. You’re paying for somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing to be there when you have a question"

Often no, what I need from support is something I could technically do or am willing to work out, but cannot because it needs to be done on your side of the customer/business security boundary, or needs information from your side of it. e.g. the difference between support resets passwords vs self-service password resets.

This is covered down at the end of the comments in a list of recent support examples, many of them can be potentially fixed by the customers who are using the support as a consultancy service, but a couple cannot. Take password resets, you can design your company to have a self-service one or not at your choice and a good self-service one will mean fewer support requests. Thus, if you charge for support, it would incentivise you to have no self-service reset so that you can get support money for salaries. But you need to pay salaries either way because you need some techs available to run the service, and to provide support-as-consultancy.

> "Although there is a distinct response time benefit to subscribing before you need support, we do expect that a nontrivial number of people will wait until the first time they need support to subscribe. Leaving the first month at $5.00 helps protect us in that scenario."

1. There are parts of the system customers cannot get to, cannot find out about, which can go wrong, so there is the risk of every customer needing support at some point. 2) People who willingly pay a support subscription also go times when they aren't using that support. 3. The people paying for the support and not using it are subsidising the retainer fee of the technical employees being still available when the other peolpe waiting until they need support to subscribe have something still around to subscribe to. 4. Technical people employed and not doing support can do things to benefit all customers.

It only makes sense to include the cost in the fees charged to everyone. It can still be prioritised by inverse usage, or etc.

[nfsn]

There are three main problems with pay-as-you-go support based on time. All three come down to support being provided by people:

1) Unlike software objects, it is not yet possible to instantiate qualified support personnel as needed.

2) Unlike virtual machines, people get very cranky if you attempt to suspend them to disk or delete them to save resources when not in use.

3) Unlike physical hardware, uploading large volumes of data to people so they can produce useful output is extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Here's a more serious answer:

When you seek (qualified) support, you're not paying for the time it takes the person to type the right answer; you're paying for them to know the right answer. (See also: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/)

It took us quite a while to figure that out, and we tried pay-as-you-go support along the way, as someone linked below. l-lousy correctly guessed the outcome of that: more time spent arguing with people about how much we charged them for support than providing support.

Worse, that's how the person providing support makes their (minimal) income: by nickels and dimes and on other people's schedules. So, if you're doing that job, you're making very little money and frequently dealing with angry people due to a system you have no control over.

It's the tech support version of being an Amazon delivery driver. Amazon may be cool with treating people like that, but I'm not.

One detail l-lousy did get wrong (as others observe) is the 15 minutes. $5 is 5 minutes or less of a qualified person's time.

That does assume people want qualified support and not first-tier "I can't be bothered to search the FAQ, read me the right one!" interactions.

Usually, but by no means always, that's a reasonable assumption for us. People looking for that level of hand-holding tend to be much more successful with other hosting services with multiple tiers of support and (usually) phone support.

[corty]

I guess for small shops, a steady stream of income to pay a support person's salary is more important than the benefits of hourly billing like fairness and possible higher income.

[udestoworkthere]

because that is a perverse incentive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive)

[abdullahkhalids]

What you get for $1/month

> Each website in your account can use up to 1GB of disk space and 30GB of monthly bandwidth. These resource limits are enough for most normal websites. Each website can set up 3 databases and 25 email accounts.

The server specs are here

https://web.archive.org/web/20200618180933/http://www.nosupp...

[generationP]

> 30GB of monthly bandwidth. These resource limits are enough for most normal websites

Unless you have a griefer with a broadband connection and half an hour of time I guess?

[Aachen]

Yes, but how often does that really happen? I've known of this possibility since I was a teen, and sometimes it happened on fairly popular sites back when unlimited bandwidth was very expensive, but it was rare back then and I haven't heard of this actually happening to any site in the last decade. I'm sure you can find examples online, but it's way more common to get a proper DDoS than to get this kind of attack.

[Jach]

You'd think it'd be more common given how many sites are on EC2 and how expensive Amazon's egress is, but nonetheless, I never hear billing horror stories from that vector.

[toast0]

At my last job, we would get casually DDoSeD from time to time. One of the ones I remember was a wordpress pingback reflection to a large file. Not too hard to handle (pingback is dumb and needs to die in a fire, but at least wordpress sets user-agent), but used a ton of bandwidth until sorted it out.

[LinuxBender]

This was a common prank on mobile browsers using 30+GB favicon.ico files. I am not even sure that was ever truly fixed in all the browsers, might be a good thing to test. The browsers would continue to download the favicon in the background even if you left the page. People that were roaming would get their cellphone accounts suspended. Providers reacted by putting roaming limits in place, but it still caused grief for people.

[PeterisP]

Well, to protect from that you need to pay more than $1 of hosting or put up a free CDN in front of it.

[spacemanmatt]

CDNs are the only sites that have ever saturated my broadband or fiber connections. Accessing 'mere mortal' web sites is way slower. Block out the whole day on your calendar.

[generationP]

OK, true -- I guess you can slow it down Zeno-style per IP if you set it up correctly.

[bluedino]

Reminds me of the old prgmr.com:

An easy to understand price schedule: $4/month per account, and $1/month for every 64MiB ram. Please note; this means all plans come with $4/month worth of support.

[alanpost]

Prgmr.com owner here.

While that copy is old, and our pricing reflects the hardware we run on today, the quip has now been updated to: "You get $5/month of support," which is the price of the smallest package we offer.

That wisecrack aside, the reality of the support we provide is more in-line with our byline: "We do not assume you are stupid." In practice, and with a hat tip to pera replying to you here, that means we provide what you might call peer support--we explain what's going on, what steps are necessary to correct it, and take responsibility when we caused the issue. And expect similar candor.

As you might expect, most of the technical support we provide is routine--with sufficient information communicated to both parties the problem is typically straightforward to resolve. But we treat tickets on their merit and customer reports do come in that admit more substantive investigation and resolution:

the LAN of 16 Million Hosts: https://prgmr.com/blog/2020/07/17/classful-networking.html

Possible Data Corruption on Debian Buster: https://prgmr.com/blog/2020/07/15/debian-buster.html

Debugging freebsd.org Resolution Failure: https://prgmr.com/blog/2020/04/23/debugging-freebsd-resoluti...

The people you talk to when you write us have the authority to investigate and--if correctable on our end--resolve your problem.

[pera]

I know but I believe they should rephrase that: I have been using their VPSs for ten years and they have the best customers support I have ever dealt with :)

[achairapart]

Also, no one noticed how funny is that they actually used Microsoft servers/tech for their own website (At least I presume by seeing urls ending in .aspx[0]) while offering "Linux Hosting"?

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190608074736/https://www.nosup...

[intrasight]

These days it would be a presumption since .net is well-supported on Linux

[tyingq]

The Cpanel licenses would take 30 cents/month out of that $1 too.

[kall]

If that kind of thing is appealing to anyone, check out uberspace.de. It’s the best possible version of shared hosting and it can even cost 1€ too (you should pay more though).

Unlike this thing they are both super friendly to all manner of linux nerd stuff yet provide excellent, gracious support where they teach you the stuff you don’t know.

[richardfey]

If they appreciate what an "expert" is, they surely could hire one in security.

[fukmbas]

Honestly just sounds like a bullshit way to not provide support for your product.

[kstrauser]

I love that model when done well. Others have mentioned NearlyFreeSpeech.net web hosting.

What they provide to me: a place to upload my static web pages to, period.

What I ask from them: serve these web pages I've uploaded, period.

I don't want or need support for any of that. If something breaks on my part, I can and will diagnose and fix it. If something breaks on their end and they need to fix it, then that's a bug report and not a support request.

In exchange for that, their prices are dirt cheap and perfect for the things I need it for. I couldn't possibly host it myself for the prices they charge me. I think that's a good example of there the business model makes a huge amount of sense for all involved.