Waking up to a surprise $100 invoice from LowEndTalk to maintain a provider tag left a bad taste in my mouth. ( See: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/177690/is-this-legit-lmao/ )
I rarely post offers and the decision seems so rushed, forced and urgent that it doesn’t pass my sniff test.
Anyhow, guess I’ll get used to HostedTalk and participate more. I figure others will likely do the same.
Lol wow
How much do I owe you for mine? Can I just send you a Taco Bell gift card and some Red Bull?
Everyone knows I’m a cheap bribe. A compliment on my hair goes far.
Send him some of those mini cupcakes and he’ll pretty much do anything you want.
Looking like I’m joining the club. 
LET’s days have been numbered for a while now though.
Glad to have you! We may not have volume, but we have heart 
You can have volume and be hollow… Sadly several other forums are like that. Glad to be onboard, I wish I found this sooner!
The way I see it is the bulk of the traffic on LET must be from people trying to find good deals. If providers don’t pay and can’t post = no good deals anymore.
He’s taking a big risk for some extra cash. If a lot of providers pull out, all he has left left is a forum full of argumentative teenagers (who are actually in their 40s). Oh and Racknerd of course. Perhaps they’ll change the colour scheme to purple…
Maybe I should offer my services for consulting on how to maximize potential revenue from LET. Problem is I’d charge way more than that $100 for it, only so many hours in a day lol
But really the only thing I’m good at there is instinctively feeling out the threshold of the impulse buy for the average user there. Just from spending that much time there. No math or algorithm, just take a shot and say “2GB, $5, go.”
I just made an account here for this same reason. I’m a customer, not a provider, but this whole thing is just so disconnected from the wishes of the userbase.
Same. Mostly customer, but also provider.
I think a lot of your sales from LET stems from the fact you have no real competition on there in terms of mail services. You do it, you do it very well, you come highly recommended by the community and you do it at a price that is reasonable with no real direct competitors.
Everyone and their brother is selling VMs on LET. To stand out of the crowd you have to do something noticeably different, offer prices considerably less (which is only profitable if you already have enough capital to outright own your hardware and pay staff to support thousands of clients you’re making a few bucks on), or already be a well established member of the community that people will gladly promote via word of mouth (See: BuyVM). A smaller start up is less likely to purchase the $200/YR tag, not because they can’t afford it, but because it’s likely it may not even pay for itself if the rest of the offers are going to be from the big dogs who can charge significantly less for their service, and gain more business from it due to having less visible competition.
I may still toss some money their way when we do our once annual big crypto sale, but unless you actively set a schedule to post a new offer as soon as you possibly can and do something to stand out, I don’t think it’ll be worth it.
TL;DR: MXRoute’s success on LET is mainly due to no real competition, you being a valued and known member of the community with good contributions, being an expert in what you do and of course all the word of mouth. That doesn’t translate well to a new start up or younger company that doesn’t have the scale that the big dogs like RackNerd does.
Just my $0.02 which I’ll have to charge you about $0.0215 for now due to inflation. 
I always wanted to hang out (lurk, read) here more but the software annoys me to no end. Damn you Jarland. But still, hi, mxroute forever etc.
Yeah, the mail service puts you in a pretty unique spot. I’m guessing the changes around G Suite are also bringing in new customers.
I’ve also been running a mail service since maybe 2008 and it’s used by a few hundred users, mostly companies. But not public or as professional as MXroute. My friends running MSPs and IT support businesses tell me that “everyone uses Exchange” and “nobody wants IMAP”.
I’m not convinced that’s true and everyone will use O365. MXroute kinda confirms that. And there is more demand for privacy. Where do you see the industry moving? Everyone on Gmail and O365? Would be pretty terrible.
Most will spread out to the other big names like Zoho and fastmail I think.
Speaking from experience, this is not a great solution. I wanted it to be, but wow, it was terrible.
The real key there, for me, was that they send emails to the SenderScore feedback loop not because the user hit “Report Spam” but because it was filtered as spam by their internal filters. Now, Microsoft does this with their feedback loop so I get it, but everyone out there is processing SenderScore loops as intentional reports because that’s how the average loop is managed through them.
The result being that you are frequently removed from mailing lists by transactional providers if you have spam filtering on.
I think the deal breaker for me was we discovered the standard pricing tier service has pretty severe message receiving limits. It basically forces you to upgrade to the professional pricing tier. I wanted to like the service as an alternative to one of the big guys, but being forced into the professional pricing tier at $9/month/user to be able to receive email is too much given the other options out there.
Google has receive limits too but as far as I know they’re undocumented. The week someone got mad at me at DO I had to miss important company emails. All because of one single IP at OVH running a loop.