HostDoc closing down

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Comments

  • @Francisco said:

    @cybertech said:

    @FAT32 said:

    @SmallWeb said:
    What have you got out of interest?

    2 of the most recent ones (not the extremely limited ones, still in stock after hours)

    4 CPU (Ryzen 3900X)
    2GB RAM
    15GB NVMe SSD
    1TB Bandwidth @ 1Gbps
    KVM
    Los Angeles
    £2.49/m

    Mine was OVH France 4x 3800x same config but ECC ram, £25/yr

    Was gonna move production over but alas..

    Try not to take this as a put down, but how can you do the math on such a plan and go "this sounds like a completely sustainable product that I'll possibly put my livelihood on"?

    I'd shake my head when I would see their offers. They decided to chase after SMARTHOST's $5/m plan as well as other crazy offers placed on whatever equipment they feel they got a deal on (E7's??). They had a nervous breakdown with one of their providers that was completely ridiculous.

    Even if you completely own your platform (IP's, hardware, can afford to order from something besides the value menu, etc), these plans are all loss leaders, or worse, "floaters", plans to make the bills this month.

    Support the young and growing providers. Give them positive feedback to help them better themselves. That said, people need to stop looking the other way at obviously bad business planning and sustainable pricing all in the face of bitchin' deal.

    All it does is hurt the industry for the new hosts that are trying to take thing seriously. The bigger providers can scoff this bullshit off, we'll even pull in a good chunk of the clientbase since people are done being burnt for the 9th time. The smaller providers that did everything right (owning their gear when possible, sustainable pricing, funds in the bank to support the slow months or when they aren't profitable yet, etc) suffer greatly.

    EDIT - fixing some franisim's

    Francisco

    Agreed! Business, be it brick and mortar or online, businesses must follow the same policy.

    Respect your competitions. Don't bad mouth them, in public or privately. Specially those, who are legends such as this guy above. Respect the new guys, who shows good intentions.
    Respect your customer.
    Be prepared for the shitty months.
    Be prepared for shit to hit the fan.
    Price things appropriately. Trying to compete with providers, who are industry leaders and owns huge infrastructure, purely based on pricing is a suicide attempt.

  • WSSWSS OGRetired

    @seriesn said:
    Respect your customer.
    Be prepared for the shitty months.
    Be prepared for shit to hit the fan.

    How much for just a sloppy kiss?

    My pronouns are like/subscribe.

  • @WSS said:

    @seriesn said:
    Respect your customer.
    Be prepared for the shitty months.
    Be prepared for shit to hit the fan.

    How much for just a sloppy kiss?

    Price changes depending on where ;)

  • cybertechcybertech OGBenchmark King
    edited February 2020

    Hope doc gets a long overdue deep sleep, rethink the whole journey and make steps to ensure mistakes do not recur, margins remain motivating, with better PR.

    At one point he was on his way to becoming the best OVH reseller never seen before.

    Every doc needs a nurse; every cociu needs a mikept.

    I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.

  • @Francisco

    You are one of the few providers I have a huge amount of respect for so will try my best to not get into debate with you, however, despite what you may see on the surface or may estimate as probable for your offerings.
    I ensured from day1 my plans were always sustainable. If they turned out to be slow sellers, I got rid of them.

    Had I closed my doors after 6 months, sure, throw your stones.

    I have been here nearly 3 years. Always used some of the best hardware, upgraded hardware when needed. Floaters or non sustainable outfits cannot do this. I did it month in month out without an issue.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Hosting ProviderOG

    @HostDoc said:
    @Francisco

    You are one of the few providers I have a huge amount of respect for so will try my best to not get into debate with you, however, despite what you may see on the surface or may estimate as probable for your offerings.
    I ensured from day1 my plans were always sustainable. If they turned out to be slow sellers, I got rid of them.

    Had I closed my doors after 6 months, sure, throw your stones.

    I have been here nearly 3 years. Always used some of the best hardware, upgraded hardware when needed. Floaters or non sustainable outfits cannot do this. I did it month in month out without an issue.

    There's at least one person showing a 9 vCPU on an 8 thread box.

    You also just proved my point. You were at this for 3 years, but made no motions to be more sustainable. Move to colocation, things like that.

    Maybe you were profitable, but not so profitable that it made the headache and loss of sleep worth it. BuyVM, well, mostly BuyShared, are huge drains on me mentally and personally. If it wasn't making me a good living I would've sold it long ago. I'm sure you're likely in the same boat.

    Francisco

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  • @Francisco said:

    @HostDoc said:
    @Francisco

    You are one of the few providers I have a huge amount of respect for so will try my best to not get into debate with you, however, despite what you may see on the surface or may estimate as probable for your offerings.
    I ensured from day1 my plans were always sustainable. If they turned out to be slow sellers, I got rid of them.

    Had I closed my doors after 6 months, sure, throw your stones.

    I have been here nearly 3 years. Always used some of the best hardware, upgraded hardware when needed. Floaters or non sustainable outfits cannot do this. I did it month in month out without an issue.

    There's at least one person showing a 9 vCPU on an 8 thread box.

    You also just proved my point. You were at this for 3 years, but made no motions to be more sustainable. Move to colocation, things like that.

    Maybe you were profitable, but not so profitable that it made the headache and loss of sleep worth it. BuyVM, well, mostly BuyShared, are huge drains on me mentally and personally. If it wasn't making me a good living I would've sold it long ago. I'm sure you're likely in the same boat.

    Francisco

    If you saw what was going on in the background, your comments may be a little different.

    But as mentioned above, it is easy to make judgement on what you see on the surface.
    My vCores were 25% of a thread. 9vCores = 2.25 threads

    Regards

  • SagnikSSagnikS Hosting ProviderOG
    edited February 2020

    Having more vCPUs/vCores on a VM than logical CPUs on the host is a big no no, some hypervisors actively try to stop you from doing that, as it brings the performance down.

  • @SagnikS said:
    Having more vCPUs/vCores on a VM than logical CPUs on the host is a big no no, some hypervisors actively try to stop you from doing that, as it brings the performance down.

    Not a popular opinion with some quarters..

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  • Too bad, I was genuinely rooting for @HostDoc. He had the best deals for the Singapore locations; I daresay even if he raised his prices a bit, I would have jumped in nevertheless.

  • SagnikSSagnikS Hosting ProviderOG

    @poisson said:

    @SagnikS said:
    Having more vCPUs/vCores on a VM than logical CPUs on the host is a big no no, some hypervisors actively try to stop you from doing that, as it brings the performance down.

    Not a popular opinion with some quarters..

    It's not an opinion, it's a fact :P. Then again, I did that mistake in my first host, a few years back. :sweat_smile:

  • It was shocking ... I was considering jump into HostDoc last week since their price is 1/3 with my original provider. Luckyly, The original provider's excellent service during last three years attracted me stay.

    "Good deals usually hurts providers and those serious customers." This idea kept me thinking in the last few months.

    Thanked by (1)dahartigan

    Action and Reaction in history

  • Sad news. I'd only just recently got a VM with HostDoc to use as part of a Jenkins build cluster so was shocked on receiving this message this morning.

    But to echo other sentiments I wish @HostDoc the very best for the future and that I valued the, albeit short, service I received from him.

  • InceptionHostingInceptionHosting Hosting ProviderOG
    edited February 2020

    Very unexpected, very sad, from my perspective it seems like a huge over reaction but if your not making the money you want and it started to impact you negatively to the point you feel this is the best option then I respect the decision.

    I have worked many days/nights without sleep on issues, raid array failures, customer data loss/recovery, one of the DC’s I use getting the servers repo’d, 2 week long DDOS attacks, migrations and conversions of thousands of containers and everything in between.

    When it is just you at times of serious fatigue and high emotion every inconsiderate ticket cuts deep, every comment online feels like a personal attack.

    To be honest there have been a few “is it worth it moments” for me over the years to the point I listed Inception Hosting for sale after little under 2 years, after having a big issue with a lot of public vitriol, I was done, but when the dust settled I came to my senses.

    Now I just ride it like a road bump instead, it’s not going to be comfortable and you just have to remember the dust will settle at some stage, but I suppose everyone has their line and that line is made by the shit you have been through before the next shit.

    This was an alkward one for me, I always thought of the doc as a well put together whole package that did a great job of exciting the community from day 1, as a forum admin I had to wear a separate hat, when things like this happen I can’t just shut the conversation down, I hope he understands that.

    I think it is important to many customers to remember something that Tim from hostigation used to say to bring things right back in perspective when people got above their station publicly about a 20 minute outage “Stop acting like you are paying for enterprise services” usually with a little bit harsher language :) but that one when I first saw him hush an angry crowd was a big one for me that helped align my brain to the market early on.

    This really is not an enterprise market segment even the big boys here have little or no redundancy and the biggest use desktop kit, this market segment was always about being able to put the effort in to doing more with less by building in your own redundancy at a fraction of the cost, to many people literally expect 24x7 365 to be standard now and seem genuinely shocked when you don’t back their data up for them for $8 p/year.

    Anyway I am rambling now, I wish hostdoc all the best and suggest at this stage he just stops engaging and focuses on the closure and new life.

    https://inceptionhosting.com
    Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.

  • MikePTMikePT Hosting ProviderOGServices Provider
    edited February 2020

    @cybertech said:
    Hope doc gets a long overdue deep sleep, rethink the whole journey and make steps to ensure mistakes do not recur, margins remain motivating, with better PR.

    At one point he was on his way to becoming the best OVH reseller never seen before.

    Every doc needs a nurse; every cociu needs a mikept.

    I'm not his. He is mine.
    @cociu

  • havochavoc OGContent Writer
    edited February 2020

    Not massively surprised. Was pretty clear that he wasn't having fun anymore.

    Anyway - was fun while it lasted. Thanks doc

    Gonna suck to replace...can't see anything comparable at that pricepoint (6 usd for a 4 core ryzen). Guess he was right about the no profit part

  • Personally I’ve never experienced any trouble with HostDoc. Had a small UK VM at theirs at a reasonable price. Performed well over the last months and since it got migrated to an EPYC it performed great. Used it for some testing, so I’m going to have it replaced.

    Looking at his public record over here and at the old place the last months, I regret that I bought it. Not that I dislike Chike or anything. But a professional webhoster should not be working on the principle of ‘act first, think later’. And this is basically what we’ve seen happening the last months. Engaging in a fight with RS, ignoring a serious security issue (even actively denying it at first). Which almost made me cancel my VPS there, because I don’t want a provider that ignores these kind of issues.

    I’m certainly hoping that this isn’t one of those ‘act first’ moments.

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  • This is very sad news because other than BuyVM IH RamNode -------- HostDoc has been the most stable & reliable vps provider for me. Having said that I believe & understand that no homo sapiens is perfect. Doc is really good at sysadmin skills but he should have never been the PR guy of his company but I can understand that operating at such thin margins hiring someone for that role was not possible.

    Doc you are a really good guy & I wish you all the best for whatever you do rest of your life!

    Thanked by (1)Nick_A

    Recommend: SmallWeb|BuyVM|Linode|RamNode

  • Not very surprised to be honest, but still sad when a business has to close like this.

    Props to then for doing refunds and exiting the market in good standing.

    Thanked by (2)AlwaysSkint bdl
  • edited February 2020

    @AnthonySmith comments like that continue to raise my respect for you. A far cry from my very first impressions, way back. ;)

    It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
    NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)

  • InceptionHostingInceptionHosting Hosting ProviderOG
    edited February 2020

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    @AnthonySmith comments like that continue to raise my respect for you. A far cry from my very first impressions, way back. ;)

    Yeah I either make a good first impression or totally fuck it up, rarely a middle ground.

    https://inceptionhosting.com
    Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.

  • @AnthonySmith said:

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    @AnthonySmith comments like that continue to raise my respect for you. A far cry from my very first impressions, way back. ;)

    Yeah I either make a good first impression or totally fuck it up, rarely a middle ground.

    You are a sexy beast!

  • @seriesn said:

    @AnthonySmith said:

    @AlwaysSkint said:
    @AnthonySmith comments like that continue to raise my respect for you. A far cry from my very first impressions, way back. ;)

    Yeah I either make a good first impression or totally fuck it up, rarely a middle ground.

    You are a sexy beast!

    ?

    Squats are the new Push-ups

  • i am also sad... can't think of anything else to say.. maybe later

  • edited February 2020

    sounds perfect

  • ndelaespadandelaespada Hosting ProviderOG

    Ouch, really sad this is the reason why he's closing down, as Anthony mentioned before, this industry has its challenges and if one wants to succeed it takes a lot of courage and endurance I'd say...
    Anyways, best of luck for Hostdoc, he probably only needs some time to think, clear his head and come back stronger.

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  • @AlwaysSkint said:
    @AnthonySmith comments like that continue to raise my respect for you. A far cry from my very first impressions, way back. ;)

    Haha, to be honest, I used to think Ant was the biggest wanker in the world. It wasn't until recently we had a chat and realised we both took each other wrong and looking back, it's clear. Anthony is a good bloke :-)

    Get the best deal on your next VPS or Shared/Reseller hosting from RacknerdTracker.com - The original aff garden.

  • sad to see a well established provider move away. i wish @hostdoc to come back in Industry soon.

    not tested their vps. but their high-end cpu,nvme disk offer were crazy and needed for the growing hosting market.

  • someshzadesomeshzade Hosting ProviderOG

    Best luck for the future @HostDoc and team!

    Nexa Racks - Reliable Web Hosting Company

  • All the best @HostDoc
    Let me know if you need a new logo when you come back ;)

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