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The thing is, American customer service is much like American insurance -- it's nothing but a financial black hole in the eyes of the bean counters.

It's about saving a little money now.

This is foresight that I wish American companies had.

If the rate of lost sales because of individual angry customers is less than the money saved from denial of service, it's a win.

OK, this may just be a hell of a coincidence, but the day you post this on /. you raise your price by $9.04?

The base price is the price before time or quantity discounts apply. The price I cite in the slashdot post as "if you pay for a long time" and the price on the price chart for two-year payment are the same. The prices in that post are correct; they're just phrased in a confusing fashion. My apologies. I will endeavour to be clearer in the future.

No, it isn't coincidence that I updated the prices before I made my slashdot post. They went up by one dollar, though, not nine, and the price update was before I posted to SlashDot, not after.

Your obviously not yet updated Plans page says ... Single slices start at $21.96/mo

Yeah, that's correct. The cheapest available price for a slice is the two-year prepay rate, which is $21.96/mo. The base price for one slice - the price you pay if you're paying monthly - is $31/mo. Therefore, the two year rate is about a 30% savings. I probably just shouldn't have mentioned the base price rate without mentioning the calculation method.

The calculation is simple. Base_price * quantity_discount * timeframe_discount = total_cost. Total_cost / months = monthly_cost. If you buy 24 months, you only pay for 17 of them, and there's no quantity discount for a single slice. Therefore, the cheapest price possible for a single slice is (31*1*(17/24)) for two years, or $527; divided into 24 months, that works out to $21.958333. I rounded up the extra one sixth cent.

So, yeah. One thing I've learned today is that I need to be much, much clearer about pricing, and that I need to choose my terminology more carefully. The term "base price" is apparently confusing. However, if you'll look at the "one slice" row in the price chart, I think you'll be pleased to find that all the numbers hold up, and that the problem is simply my choice of phrasing.

I am NOT saying it's a bad price, since I really don't know what the value for what you're charging is, I'm just amazed at the timing of the increase.

The timing of the increase is no coincidence; I've been planning to increase prices for new customers anyway, and the SlashDot article just gave me the immediate reason. However, the prices I cited in my post are correct (for once.) One slice costs [$31.00 .. $21.96] per month, depending on how much time you buy up front.

As far as the price, well, just look at my competition. There are a lot of places that sell less than what I call a starter slice for more than $50/month, and very few places sell VPS at all at prices competitive with my two-slice package. Most VPS companies don't say anything about your CPU guarantee or your base bandwidth, and they almost all cap your total throughput.

I am only aware of eleven VPS companies whose prices I consider legitimately competitive, and I've investigated approx. 350 competitors. (No, I'm not gonna tell you who the good ones are. ;) ) I would give a list of the other 339, but it seems kinda tacky. Besides, it's a lot more effective to tell someone to "just google vps;" the places that come up high in the list, and that advertise, are the ones whose prices make me laugh under my breath.

I am proud of my prices. Maybe, um, not so proud of the phrasing; I'll work on that. :D But the numbers are awesome.

Thank you for taking me to task. If more people called hosting providers on what look like lies or dirty tricks, my job of getting customers would be a hell of a lot easier, since about half of my competition would disappear overnight.

I wish more people did as you did.

- John

Price Update Apr 5 2007
Written by GVPS Staff, April 5th, 2007
Prices have changed. All customers prior to April 5 will continue old pricing, including for new slices. Please see the pricing page for details on the new prices.

The new base price per slice is $31 US. The same breakdown applies to pre-pay discounts. The new stack discount rate is for every third slice to be half-price.

GVPS plans are straightforward; we don't play games with arbitrary numbers. Resources are divided into "slices;" just buy as many slices as you need, and stack them together (or use them seperately, as several machines, if you prefer; it's up to you. We'll give you the same price, however you want to go about it.) Single slices start at $21.96/mo; see the price chart for details. Each slice is: * 100 kB/s transfer, guaranteed minimum * 256 mHz CPU time, guaranteed minimum * 200 meg RAM * 400 meg Swap RAM * 20 gig on disk (Raid1 Pair Mirrored) If you get several slices, we'll give you extra resources per slice; see the price chart for details.

Price Update Apr 5 2007
Written by GVPS Staff, April 5th, 2007
Prices have changed. All customers prior to April 5 will continue old pricing, including for new slices. Please see the pricing page for details on the new prices.

The new base price per slice is $31 US. The same breakdown applies to pre-pay discounts. The new stack discount rate is for every third slice to be half-price.

GVPS plans are straightforward; we don't play games with arbitrary numbers. Resources are divided into "slices;" just buy as many slices as you need, and stack them together (or use them seperately, as several machines, if you prefer; it's up to you. We'll give you the same price, however you want to go about it.) Single slices start at $21.96/mo; see the price chart for details. Each slice is: * 100 kB/s transfer, guaranteed minimum * 256 mHz CPU time, guaranteed minimum * 200 meg RAM * 400 meg Swap RAM * 20 gig on disk (Raid1 Pair Mirrored) If you get several slices, we'll give you extra resources per slice; see the price chart for details.

You can host at GuaranteedVPS and get root and a bandwidth minimum with no cap starting at $13/mo, actually.

Then again, I own GuaranteedVPS, so whatever.

I should point out that I run a small VPS company called "guaranteed VPS." It's just starting up, but the premise is simple: I don't oversell boxes, ever. I guarantee all five major resources as either minimums or fixed amounts, and I give details that not many companies seem to give regarding the system's configuration. The prices are cheap, there are good discounts for pre-pay, and the bandwidth is awesome.

On the downside, it's a two-man operation, and we both have day-jobs, so the tech support is pretty poor. The actual MegaPOP is awesome, and all the disks are RAID1 pair mirrors, so we're not going to have any downtime because someone didn't hot-swap a dead drive, or whatever, but this is really a service made for people who know how to run their own stuff.

Anyway, it's 21 bucks a month for root and a guaranteed 100k/s at all times, and twelve bucks a month for 50k/s, if you pay a long time up-front. Plans get bigger, too, and discounts get pretty big pretty quick; that 100k/s is called a slice, and if you want to stack slices, I'll give you every third for half off.

Anyway, it's hosting, so there's a million options, and I don't really need to break it down here. Just look at the price chart. My customers seem to be happy with what they're getting. Since you've got root, you can take down Apache and put up something else, if you want (lightstreamer and YAWS come to mind.) Need six million weird programming languages? That's cool, just download and compile them; you've got GCC, perl, whatever you need. 'Course, if it's in RPM or Yum, it's prolly dead simple anyway. :D

But seriously, it's cheaper than the alternative, namely a dedicated box, if you need funky stuff like Erlang or Rails or Twisted Python or whatever, and I'd like to think my prices are more than competitive with the other VPS vendors out there. Give us a look. You can't go wrong when you know exactly what you're getting.

Personally, I've had great luck with GuaranteedVPS -- I have both my personal accounts and my business accounts there, and they give you *complete* control of your box. They have a very large variety of hosting slices, from .5mb/s starter ranging all the way up to 9mb/s (if you need that sort of thing), and cheaper than I've seen elsewhere. Their thing seems to be instead of offering "speeds up to..." they guarantee the minimum speed instead. It's actually a much more accurate way of buying hosting.