3 ms·

What the hosting and the meat market have in common

13 points by franklaemmer 14y ago

BenBoone 14y ago
Sweet analogy.. But, you missed to mention the ecological effects.
- retube 14y ago
  I don't get this analogy at all. What is he saying, that consumers discriminate on the basis of price for both meat and hosting solutions? So what? This is hardly an insight. Most products and services are largely discriminated by price. Meat is so cheap in the US due to a mix of lax regulation (around animal care, feed, bulking products, hormones etc) and various financial incentives (subsidies, tax benefits etc.). No idea what this has got to do with the costs of hosting or what the parellels are between the two industries.
  - davidkatz 14y ago
    I think the point was that the quality of both meat and hosting products varies greatly but is not easily understood by consumers. When consumers don't understand what makes something good, you're left with no choice but to compete on price, driving quality down even further. In the end you could get a market where most offerings suck, very little people are aware of it, and almost everyone is worse off. I do however agree that the article provided very little insight.
davidkatz 14y ago
The direction seems fruitful, but there was very little to learn in this article. More insight into what is actually wrong with hosting providers would have made this a lot better. I now feel about Hacker News round about how I felt with TechCrunch a few months before I stopped reading it completely. I'm mainly here because of inertia, and because there is still great content from time to time and I don't want to miss it. My attention is very much up for the taking. The moment something better comes along, I'd be the first to switch. I wish PG put more love into HN. It used to be amazing, now it's just nice. At least, that's my opinion.
- swader 14y ago
  Perhaps you can help us all turn Quibb (http://quibb.com http://quibb.com) into something like that?
  - davidkatz 14y ago
    Quibb seems interesting, but from your homepage it's hard for me to get a sense of value. May I ask why you don't let me see your content?
    - swader 14y ago
      I'm just a user, but the gist behind the "restrictiveness" is weeding out the chaff and avoiding the flood of quantity over quality that's overly present on App.net and other networks and content aggregators. The entry policy will be much more open later on, once it comes out of alpha/beta/whatever state, but for now, a personal contact with the founder and CEO, Sandi, is all that's required, just so she gets a sense of you being a real person who knows what they're talking about. Would you like an invite link so you can see if the content is (or can become) to your liking? Anyone who would like one should feel free to ping me via geekli.st, (http://geekli.st/Swader http://geekli.st/Swader)
      - davidkatz 14y ago
        At least the homepage doesn't seem that restrictive to me. It looks like it was designed to communicate something about Quibb and get me to apply. I just think it does that very well.
- grep2 14y ago
  What would be required to grab your attention? Curated content? A better discussion platform? Or just plain more signal per noise? One approach I'd like to see implemented is some monte carlo comment display algorithm. Assign every user a base point level (based on his contributions/selectable?), show every comment/post with score above this level, but comments below with decreasing probability. This has the advantage of allowing new/initially low-ranked stuff to get picked up faster than a hard threshold, while keeping the noise at a level acceptable for the user. Or is this nonsense?
franklaemmer 14y ago
THX for all the comments on my article. I have learned that it was a bit too short and maybe a bit too superficial for the HN community. In fact the original version was much longer but i decided to trim it to the core message.
riffraff 14y ago
related, our davidw's seven years old article that hosting is a market for lemons http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons
- franklaemmer 14y ago
  great article indeed, thanks for pointing us.
deleted 14y ago
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zacharyvoase 14y ago
So part of the solution for meat is to "vote for a party that supports meat market regulation." But no such recommendation is made for hosting providers. Regulate all the industries—except mine! The first comment on the article is also quite lovely.
auggierose 14y ago
Is this really number 2 ranking on HN right now. Time to get the hell outta here ...
IsaacL 14y ago
People buy hosting based on (RAM / CPU / bandwidth) for your buck. They don't buy based on customer service. I think this is OK for the middle of the market - VPS customers, for whom a Linux shell is an adequate interface. (I don't know about the higher end of the market, dedicated servers and up, but I imagine those kind of customers are willing to pay more for quality service). It really sucks for the low-end web hosting market - the kind of services where you get a shared folder on Apache to upload PHP scripts, and a cPanel-type interface for one-click install of Wordpress, Magento, etc. If you're charging customers less than £10/month, any support tickets they open are going to eat massively into your margins. So all these sites have really crappy outsourced service. I once helped a friend who was struggling to install Prestashop on his webhost. The support thread was like "I'm having problem X". "It seems to be fixed now, ticket closed". "No, I'm still having the same problem". "It appears to be fixed now, ticket closed". "It's not fixed, I'm still having the same problem..." Every reply was from a different support rep, meaning their attempt to cut corners in the name of efficiency turned into a massive inefficiency.
- hausburger 14y ago
  Exactly. You get what you pay for, no matter the market.

13 points by franklaemmer 14y ago

BenBoone 14y ago

Sweet analogy.. But, you missed to mention the ecological effects.

retube 14y ago
I don't get this analogy at all. What is he saying, that consumers discriminate on the basis of price for both meat and hosting solutions? So what? This is hardly an insight. Most products and services are largely discriminated by price. Meat is so cheap in the US due to a mix of lax regulation (around animal care, feed, bulking products, hormones etc) and various financial incentives (subsidies, tax benefits etc.). No idea what this has got to do with the costs of hosting or what the parellels are between the two industries.
- davidkatz 14y ago
  I think the point was that the quality of both meat and hosting products varies greatly but is not easily understood by consumers. When consumers don't understand what makes something good, you're left with no choice but to compete on price, driving quality down even further. In the end you could get a market where most offerings suck, very little people are aware of it, and almost everyone is worse off. I do however agree that the article provided very little insight.

davidkatz 14y ago

The direction seems fruitful, but there was very little to learn in this article. More insight into what is actually wrong with hosting providers would have made this a lot better. I now feel about Hacker News round about how I felt with TechCrunch a few months before I stopped reading it completely. I'm mainly here because of inertia, and because there is still great content from time to time and I don't want to miss it. My attention is very much up for the taking. The moment something better comes along, I'd be the first to switch. I wish PG put more love into HN. It used to be amazing, now it's just nice. At least, that's my opinion.

swader 14y ago
Perhaps you can help us all turn Quibb (http://quibb.com http://quibb.com) into something like that?
- davidkatz 14y ago
  Quibb seems interesting, but from your homepage it's hard for me to get a sense of value. May I ask why you don't let me see your content?
  - swader 14y ago
    I'm just a user, but the gist behind the "restrictiveness" is weeding out the chaff and avoiding the flood of quantity over quality that's overly present on App.net and other networks and content aggregators. The entry policy will be much more open later on, once it comes out of alpha/beta/whatever state, but for now, a personal contact with the founder and CEO, Sandi, is all that's required, just so she gets a sense of you being a real person who knows what they're talking about. Would you like an invite link so you can see if the content is (or can become) to your liking? Anyone who would like one should feel free to ping me via geekli.st, (http://geekli.st/Swader http://geekli.st/Swader)
    - davidkatz 14y ago
      At least the homepage doesn't seem that restrictive to me. It looks like it was designed to communicate something about Quibb and get me to apply. I just think it does that very well.
grep2 14y ago
What would be required to grab your attention? Curated content? A better discussion platform? Or just plain more signal per noise? One approach I'd like to see implemented is some monte carlo comment display algorithm. Assign every user a base point level (based on his contributions/selectable?), show every comment/post with score above this level, but comments below with decreasing probability. This has the advantage of allowing new/initially low-ranked stuff to get picked up faster than a hard threshold, while keeping the noise at a level acceptable for the user. Or is this nonsense?

franklaemmer 14y ago

THX for all the comments on my article. I have learned that it was a bit too short and maybe a bit too superficial for the HN community. In fact the original version was much longer but i decided to trim it to the core message.

riffraff 14y ago

related, our davidw's seven years old article that hosting is a market for lemons http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons

franklaemmer 14y ago
great article indeed, thanks for pointing us.

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deleted 14y ago

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zacharyvoase 14y ago

So part of the solution for meat is to "vote for a party that supports meat market regulation." But no such recommendation is made for hosting providers. Regulate all the industries—except mine! The first comment on the article is also quite lovely.

auggierose 14y ago

Is this really number 2 ranking on HN right now. Time to get the hell outta here ...

IsaacL 14y ago

People buy hosting based on (RAM / CPU / bandwidth) for your buck. They don't buy based on customer service. I think this is OK for the middle of the market - VPS customers, for whom a Linux shell is an adequate interface. (I don't know about the higher end of the market, dedicated servers and up, but I imagine those kind of customers are willing to pay more for quality service). It really sucks for the low-end web hosting market - the kind of services where you get a shared folder on Apache to upload PHP scripts, and a cPanel-type interface for one-click install of Wordpress, Magento, etc. If you're charging customers less than £10/month, any support tickets they open are going to eat massively into your margins. So all these sites have really crappy outsourced service. I once helped a friend who was struggling to install Prestashop on his webhost. The support thread was like "I'm having problem X". "It seems to be fixed now, ticket closed". "No, I'm still having the same problem". "It appears to be fixed now, ticket closed". "It's not fixed, I'm still having the same problem..." Every reply was from a different support rep, meaning their attempt to cut corners in the name of efficiency turned into a massive inefficiency.

hausburger 14y ago
Exactly. You get what you pay for, no matter the market.