It seems everything on the web has been downgrading lately. Some great free services I have used supposedly “upgrade” their services, then I find out that they only put more limits on things and jack their prices up on their pricing plans. Live365.com which always had 365 megabytes for free just upgraded last night, now they only have 100 megabytes for free. When I couldn’t access their site last night because they said they were upgrading, I was thinking “Oh goodie, they’re making it better.” Boy was I wrong, in my opinion they downgraded. I was looking at their pricing plans and it’s so much more a month for an extra amount of space, and less then double that for a little extra more, and so on.
The service I have my website on, hispeed.com. Great service, they offer unlimited space for their virtual hosting for 19.95 a month. Great, I need that since I’m always uploading pictures, I have this large photo album project going on there. Luckily I signed up a month before they merged with another company, us.net. I was worried when I first found out about their merge, which was a month after I signed up. The hosting plans with us.net now have limits and you get so little space in my opinion. The 19.95 a month hosting a plan is only 80 megabytes, the 12 or 15 dollar plan is 10 megabytes.
Luckily I’m grandfathered to my original plan, so I luck out there. And on Live365 I keep the amount of space I have been using for free with the amount from files I already have on there, 256 megabytes. But, I cannot add anymore songs to it now.
I’m not complaining with what I personally have, I lucked out with my website plan and half lucked out with the live365. What my real complaint is, it seems like many other services have been downgrading. There were a few others I remember that also downgraded, but I can’t remember what services they were exactly.
Why must everything downgrade? Is it only for money reasons? Are they getting greedier and greedier? Or could it be that there are too many people signing up each day that their servers start overloading? As annoyed as I get with the downgrading I do consider the possible reasons as to why they would this. But, it’s still annoying as hell, especially when you are already paying for a website.
Anyone else feel the same way? Anyone else also notice the large downgrading trend going on lately on the web?
There are three kinds of business plans on the net.
One is porn.
One is giving things away for free and selling advertising.
One is selling things below cost to build market share.
The problem with the last two is that companies exist to make a profit, and they are not making one.
The free 365 and many others counted on advertising revenue to pay for all the free stuff they were giving you. Well as it turns out, your eyeballs aren’t worth as much as they thought they would be, so they need to start charging you. That sucks, but consider the fact that you got a free ride for quite a while.
As for everything else on the web except porn, they are running out of funding and the purseholders are getting pissed. They need to get in the black and fast. So they need to stop selling things below cost. There are two ways to do this: reduce costs and increase prices. They planned to reduce costs is through building economies of scale. But there’s no time for that now. They have to increase prices. Sorry.
I agree that the “upgrade” wording is crap. Just tell the truth: we aren’t making money so we need to start charging. I can buy that, if the service is valuable to me I will pay for it. Just be honest.
A lot of free Internet services were more or less based on the idea of “running at a loss, but making up for it in volume”, gambling that they would somehow become profitable in the future. Ooops - the future is now, and capital is getting scarce. So, the focus changes from gaining a customer base at any cost to trying to make a buck of the customers actually using the service. It’s a race for naked survival, and it’ll get worse before it gets better.
$9.95/mo for 300 MB and a crapload of features. Great tech support too. I asked them a low priority question at about 10 PM and got an answer within an hour.
Yeah, hispeed.com is like that, too. I’ve got a crapload of features, free cgi scripts to use with the provided cgi bin, 25 email addresses with my domain…etc. What I really like is the unlimited space, I’m working on a large online photo album project, similar to what Opalcat has. Except the IDS photo album script she uses for her album doesn’t work on my service since I do not have interaction access with the Apache server, so I assemble my albums manually with Front Page.
I plan to have a collection of photos categorized by year starting from the time I was born, 1978, to current times. I’m sure a few hundred megabytes will get used up with all those photos. I’ve got over 50 MB on there already just from last year and this years pictures. Thankfully I still keep my unlimited space since I joined prior to the merging.
Seems like every company, mainly online companies, are merging left and right. That’s all I see lately, this company merging and that company merging, and when companies merge they downgrade. Just look at what Yahoo did taking everything over, I’ve heard many complaints about how much the Webring service sucks now since Yahoo took it over. Egroups was taken over by Yahoo, also. I have an email list set up on there for my family, I think Yahoo ruined it and it would have been better of if they left well enough alone. But, that’s my opinion.