My take on stream hosts...

[BWorld]

Now, before my rant, let it be known that this is my PERSONAL opinion and the reason I operate Stream101 the way I do. Stream101 has continuously gained customers and has been very successful, so take this for what its worth. Here we go....

 

I am a firm believer that you must STAND behind your product...you must STAND behind your business...you must accept responsibility for what your product and service is. When that is regarding a streaming host, that is ultra important. Even a micro-second of an issue can render hundreds and thousands of listeners without the blissful music they were just listening to. In an instant, it can turn choppy or just drop them all together. Now, what irritates me the most is when hosts start up and start selling packages so ridiculously priced packages. This causes good companies to lose customers. This causes good (maybe naive) customers to put their business (radio station) at risk.

 

Look at my prices, they are not the cheapest in the industry. They definitely are not the most expensive either. But I set the price as to what I think the product is worth, not the cheapest so it will just sell. I do not believe in overselling, so that does raise our costs. BUT, I can tell you that the amount of support requests we get an average of less than 10 per day (streaming support). We have over 5000 streaming clients, 60+ streaming servers, and 10 requests?!?! True because we stand behind our product and know what we are doing. We use great quality equipment and bandwidth, as I know several other hosts do, such as ShoutcastStreaming.us.

 

Nothing hurts me more when I see people getting ripped off. That is the whole reason I started in the business. That is EXACTLY what happens when a 14 year old kid starts up a company under a reseller account and charges $0.99 per month for a 128kbps Unlimited package. Its not possible and I wish people wouldn't fall for it. I don't believe in a true reseller streaming account, thats why I don't offer it. (side note...web hosting is WAY different than streaming...maybe another rant later?) There are reasonable applications for a "reseller" type account, such as a station "cluster", but that really doesn't constitute a reseller account. It's not intended for RESALE.

 

Well, that sums it up for me tonight...gotta get up early tomorrow. Feedback is welcome & encouraged!

[GKIye]

Thumbs up Marc for Your opinion and point of view !

[shoutcaststreaming]

I love when they say they have investors that make up for the difference in costs vs income.

 

It reminds me of the South Park (cartoon) episode when the gnomes start stealing Cartman's underwear. We go to their factory and the marketing gnome says "but we are losing money on every sale" .. the sales manager gnome replies "well, I guess we just have to sell more to make up for it" ...

 

Think about it.

[BWorld]

I love when they say they have investors that make up for the difference in costs vs income.

 

I know when I invest, it will be in a company that spends more than it makes! **sarcasm**

[James]

Totally agree Marc, it's becoming over saturated at times, but it's seasonal.

 

You've inspired me to write an article before bed haha. Expect something to do with stream hosting on the front page in a few mins!

[Urban Hitz Radio]

Great article. Right on the money and very informative for beginners.

[SHOUTca.st]

Well, we're a stream host - our prices are relatively cheap, however we're more than capable of sustaining our clients, and many people are very happy with our service.

 

Great article! :-)

[njtreker]

Marc, You asked for feedback, so here goes. I just set up my radio station as a hobby because I used to do with when I was younger in terrestrial radio. My day job I work in IT and can commiserate with you, but they will never give you accolades if the stuff works and will quickly jump down your throat if it doesn't. I will be honest, because I am starting out price was a big factor, I didn't go with the 99 cent stream but I balanced price and bit rate. I have been running with this service for a month and I feel it's OK and they have servers in the U.S. I will be honest when I looked at your price it was a bit out of my range right now, if I start generating a following and some donations I may look for another provider. That said, I looked at a lot of streaming providers and what I see is lacking and where you can set your business out from the rest by adding value added services. If you partnered with a couple of voice over\ production people you could offer 2 station id's and 2 sweeps to with a certain level of streaming and retain ownership of the material to motivate some folks not to jump. Also, another service I see is lacking and maybe it exists and I haven't seen it is silence monitoring that cuts over automatically to a auto DJ cue in the cloud and then texts and emails contacts (customers) to resolve the problem. Another idea would be to invest in purchasing top tracks and making them available through a virtual java player or a playlist on your server. A DJ doing a live show could utilize the virtual player and channel it. You can also look at possibly providing some content like a weekly or daily news cast, etc..... My point is that many users will go price point and jump if there is a dollar difference. If there was a streaming provider that bundled services I would consider switching. I hope you don't mind the suggestions.

 

Charlie

[BWorld]

Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately with that idea, that would definitely add more cost to our products. We'd now need to have voiceover artists on retainer as well as staff to "police" all stations to make sure they didnt "steal" the voiceover.

 

My opinion still is that a company should focus on what it is truly good at...for us, that is streaming! We do have several features that others do not bundle with, such as AutoDJ standard on all accounts with 500MB of space, HTML5 Player with Flash Fallback, Mobile App, etc.

[Urban Hitz Radio]

One major turn off for me - and maybe it's not that serious for others, but i'm old school. If I click on your Contact us link, and your site directs me to a Help Desk portal with no other way to contact you, either via phone # listing, or email address listing, i'm clicking X! That to me, means this is a one-man operation with no resources to handle a major concern. Even if you are a one-man shop, you should be able to provide a personalized support/contact service.

 

And many of the more successful guys that have been in the business for years, have more listed on their contact us page, than just a WHM help desk.

 

I believe over the last 10 or so years, the level of professionalism has gone way down hill in regards to how startups provide support for their services. It started with web hosting on WHT many moons ago.

I'm not saying not to use the help desk portal, but it can be integrated into your contact us site instead of just being the end all, be all. I want to reach out and touch you. I want a phone number, email address and maybe a postal address - as options to reach out and touch you. With just a help desk portal, you can tell me, oh we never received that request. Or just not answer.

 

If I can't recognize these ways to contact you, i'm not doing business with you - period! And I am happy to say that all businesses that my station are in communication/business with, have just that. And any time I have an issue, it's always handled promptly.

[BWorld]

One major turn off for me - and maybe it's not that serious for others, but i'm old school. If I click on your Contact us link, and your site directs me to a Help Desk portal with no other way to contact you, either via phone # listing, or email address listing, i'm clicking X! That to me, means this is a one-man operation with no resources to handle a major concern. Even if you are a one-man shop, you should be able to provide a personalized support/contact service.

 

And many of the more successful guys that have been in the business for years, have more listed on their contact us page, than just a WHM help desk.

 

I believe over the last 10 or so years, the level of professionalism has gone way down hill in regards to how startups provide support for their services. It started with web hosting on WHT many moons ago.

I'm not saying not to use the help desk portal, but it can be integrated into your contact us site instead of just being the end all, be all. I want to reach out and touch you. I want a phone number, email address and maybe a postal address - as options to reach out and touch you. With just a help desk portal, you can tell me, oh we never received that request. Or just not answer.

 

If I can't recognize these ways to contact you, i'm not doing business with you - period! And I am happy to say that all businesses that my station are in communication/business with, have just that. And any time I have an issue, it's always handled promptly.

 

Very good point! While we definitely encourage our users to try the Support Knowledgebase or Helpdesk, we do have a phone number listed. The only difference is regarding support issues. Due to so many "DJs" going rogue (because the station owners give them security answers, etc), we now require all support issues to have a ticket to track it. If you call and it is an "advanced account" issue, requiring password resets or anything along those lines, a ticket must be put in. Then we have your IP who requested it and do a decent job of checking. This has been much better, and for the most part, clients have understood why we are doing this. Of course not everyone does, but most do!

[James]

Very good point! While we definitely encourage our users to try the Support Knowledgebase or Helpdesk, we do have a phone number listed. The only difference is regarding support issues. Due to so many "DJs" going rogue (because the station owners give them security answers, etc), we now require all support issues to have a ticket to track it. If you call and it is an "advanced account" issue, requiring password resets or anything along those lines, a ticket must be put in. Then we have your IP who requested it and do a decent job of checking. This has been much better, and for the most part, clients have understood why we are doing this. Of course not everyone does, but most do!

 

Companies need to be very mindful about personal data via phone. Sure, a phone line is great for general support related questions and enquiries, but account details and server details, not so much.

 

For example, PayPal and GoDaddy have just had a major backlash over someones twitter handle. A guy had a @N twitter name, and some guy hijacked it using a phone and simply calling GoDaddy and PayPal. Horrible situation.

 

Anyway, even though I am based in Australia, we have introduced a US number in our contact us section, I try to be on it using Google Voice but most of the time its just for voicemail and I just call them back later on my personal phone. Useful for those enquiring about advertising and general site issues like forum registration. It works quite well and it's free and easy to get a US phone number these days.

[BWorld]

Not sure if you are specifically referring to my company, but when you click Support or Contact Us, we have our phone number listed right on that page. Always have. As well as documentation, videos, etc.

[djsoft]

We have over 5000 streaming clients, 60+ streaming servers, and 10 requests?!?! True because we stand behind our product and know what we are doing.

That really sounds unbelievable. We have higher number of requests with less number of customers Not because our services are bad - people often asking for an advice on how to do something, changing their streaming plans, questions about Centova (its UI is hard to follow sometimes) etc.

 

Several years ago we've had few support requests too... finally it turned out that ticket system was broken and it simply lost large number of tickets

[bigloo]

A little late to this thread, but I couldn't agree more with the OP.

 

I frequent a virtual world where many providers there sell streams for dirt cheap. One in particular, boasts everything unlimited. Unlimited autoDJ disk space, unlimited listener slots, unlimited bandwidth... all for a price of $1.99/month (when you convert the virtual currency to USD). I've tried to tell people that nothing is unlimited, and handing out stream servers with 99,999 listener slots on them is close enough to suicide.

 

But I have seen a lot of "cheaper" providers popping up. Things like 99 cents/month for 500 listeners, etc. I know we aren't the most expensive, and we are probably rather low priced than some, but we aren't the cheapest. At the end of the day, we manage things well. But we're not insane enough to promote unlimited everything and sell servers with 99,999 Slots. Like the OP, our service speaks for itself, and our uptime proves it. We've been blessed to be able to use premiere datacenters with little to no downtime in our years with them. That comes at a price though - and it ain't cheap.

 

99,999 listeners slots? Will hate to be them when some customers decided to use a chunk of that.

[djsoft]

99,999 listeners slots? Will hate to be them when some customers decided to use a chunk of that.

They may simply terminate abuser's account - it depends on ToS.

 

In web site hosting it's already normal to sell "unlimited" for something like $12/year. But they have ToS explaining the limitations of "unlimited" and terminate any account which uses lots of resources.

[bigloo]

They may simply terminate abuser's account - it depends on ToS.

 

In web site hosting it's already normal to sell "unlimited" for something like $12/year. But they have ToS explaining the limitations of "unlimited" and terminate any account which uses lots of resources.

 

That's the thing, they have no ToS. Sad, huh?

[BWorld]

That's the thing, they have no ToS. Sad, huh?

Can't believe I didnt see this reply (probably did, just forgot )

 

If a host doesnt have a TOS, there is nothing to hold either the host or client accountable, right? My advice is no ToS, run away. There should be at least something!