| hell, many years ago, I gave people "first month free" VPSs. Good god, that was a bad idea. I got lots of users, ended up buying a bunch of hardware, and worse, signing contracts on more datacenter space. I got a whole lot of abuse complaints, and had to get a larger bandwidth commit, too. (my provider at the time had the very common business model of having very high overage charges, but you could get out of the overage charges by signing a long-term contract at the new 95th percentile.) Of course, many left when they got the first bill, leaving me about where I started revenue-wise, and with much larger monthly bills. several years later, vastly increasing the resources I gave per dollar, /then/ getting featured in a blog[1] many months later, brought me up to a reasonable scale. I do think that the lower prices were necessary (but not sufficient) to start that growth. I suppose that might be more like the transistor situation than anything else; Yeah, the company was "Profitable" but only because my time was free. I was selling at a huge loss if you counted market-rate for my time. [1]http://uggedal.com/journal/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-... (I owe that one post so much; revenue more than tripled in just a few months, and I was able to go full-time. I should probably do something for that guy.) |