@dashrender said in pricing on websites:

@mike-davis said in pricing on websites:

The second reason is you can't put a price on a project like an Office 365 migration. At least I can't afford to without knowing a lot of details about the environment.

I'm not sure you need to price something specific like that.

You might list something like
Cisco firewall support $200/hr
Windows desktop support $100/hr
Unifi hardware support $150/hr
etc
But really, should an O365 migration be a project price and not hourly? You'd have to make the project price significantly more than the anticipated hourly to cover your bases in case there are issues.

If you do enough of them you can flat scope them on a base time Plus xxx per mailbox (knowing they average out). Write your scope to assume health AD and exchange, and list the first 4 hours as discovery. If it’s messy you can throw a scope amendment to fix the environment.

@dashrender said in pricing on websites:

@jaredbusch said in pricing on websites:

I suspect you are giving away a ton of your time in order to make lower fixed rate deals.

I know I did this when I used to do flat rates.. i never included my time of making the quotes.. but assuming I had an employee doing that work, who's paying them? Me - out of my profits? That's crazy talk.. The client is getting free work in this case - and that's just not good for business.

I would offer 4 hours @250$ per hour to do a scope discovery project to build the flat rate project.

@dashrender said in pricing on websites:

@mike-davis said in pricing on websites:

@coliver said in pricing on websites:

@mike-davis said in pricing on websites:

The second one says he really doesn't know how long it's going to take, but to trust him that he won't overbill me and he's going to do the best job he can. He tells me that if I pay for hours up front I'll get a better rate, but he can't really tell me how many hours he anticipates using.

This is called "time and materials" and is very common for most contractors and construction projects.

So is bidding on jobs...

Sure, but bidding on jobs at a flat rate means the seller needs to build in fluff time or risk loosing a ton of money (paying employees to work where there are problems, where the client isn't paying them for that work, because it wasn't part of the flat rate consideration).

While I did build in some overhead, the real key is aggressively scoping things in and out of scope. Customer doesn’t provide me with vpn access on time, you get a contract amendment for the wasted time and creeping my scope as I had to setup my own vpn profile. Basically “fining” the customer for bad behavior or their suppliers not delivering in time is how you protect yourself on a flat rate contract.

Listing hourly rates isn’t terribly useful because without a project scope and estimate you don’t know if it will take me 4 hours or 400. It’s like knowing how many gallons of gas I have without knowing the vehicle....

@dustinb3403 said in pricing on websites:

My biggest issue with not having a listed price for your services or software is this. If I can't even gauge how much it might cost be to do business, then how can I even begin to understand the value of your services or software.

IE: If I want to by an Amazon Echo or Google Home Mini I can just look up the list price and have a ballpark idea of what I'm going to be spending.

I should have some means of doing that, with any software or service provider. At least I feel I should. .

It boils down on more complicated software that without an SE 99% of people would order the wrong thing.

@mike-davis said in pricing on websites:

@scottalanmiller said in pricing on websites:

Nope, it's the best possible thing for them. Let's them determine their needs, get the best pricing, and not get burned by bad estimates or scope changes. From a customer side, it's literally the best thing I could imagine. Without it, they'd be stuck either paying as they go (which would force everyone into higher prices) or into the scoping disaster. It's the best form of customer protection we could think of.

Don't you have to estimate the hours to figure out how many hours they need to buy?

Why does paying as you go force higher prices?

Because
I have to carry the payroll costs up front. Blocks of hours I could discount 10%

@tim_g said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

They defined publicly as "e.g. outside the firewall", and "not restricted to affiliates or employees".

This is almost as fun as the VDI licensing that my iPad needed if it was outside the office or inside the office

Microsoft licensing based on geography or network topology is always a mess.

@scottalanmiller said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

Publicly means unidentified. If you authenticate a public user, for example (and for others reading - authenticate in no way implies AD or any form or Windows or Microsoft authentication mechanism) then they need a User CAL.
Without those you need an EC, which is a public CAL.

Who the fuck does authentication on public DNS?

@scottalanmiller said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

@storageninja said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

@scottalanmiller said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

How does a computer ever know how many users there are? Name any system in the universe that can do this?

Run a simple automated report against your Users OU....

And then your information would be potentially completely wrong. That was the point, since the thing that you license has no connection to OUs.

For example, what if you didn't use AD at all. Not like you get to skip your licensing just because you don't have that one feature.

If you use User CALs you don't have to worry about devices. It's an "Or" not an AND was my understanding.

@dashrender said in Refurbed Cisco gear? (from xByte):

@rojoloco said in Refurbed Cisco gear? (from xByte):

@dashrender said in Refurbed Cisco gear? (from xByte):

@beta said in Refurbed Cisco gear? (from xByte):

I currently have a 5508 running the APs and was looking at pricing for SmartNet renewal and thought maybe it would be smarter to get a refurbed 5508 instead and just keep that onsite as a spare.

How do you get security updates for the controllers and APs if you don't have SmartNet? And like normal I'm late to the game.

You don't. That's the problem.

LOL - that was kinda my point. How can one even consider running Cisco gear today without SmartNet? If you can't afford SmartNet, you can't afford to run Cisco. Buy Ubiquiti or MicroTik (or is it Tek?) and get life of the gear updates while saving a ton and likely getting a faster product.

Actually, Cisco lost the court case on this (after they abducted a Canadian). Security fixes are available. You also get free updates for life if you buy a 1RU switch (Catlyst 3K's etc).

https://damn.technology/free-cisco-ios-updates

@scottalanmiller said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

I somewhat agree. However, Microsoft (in this case) could not price their stuff so exorbitantly.

Doesn't matter, flat pricing like this would always screw the companies that are smaller compared to bigger ones. It's "taxing the poor".

It's a regressive tax. Also, the majority of Microsofts Revenue comes from the F500. If you think they will drop the price vs. sacrifice the SMB market if they had to make a choice and do a flat price you are crazy. Giving a lower price to SMBs without a reason for it would trigger most favored nation clauses.

I've always laughed at people who love appliance pricing (It's unlimited per box!) vs. per user pricing. On Per User Pricing I know what my cost model for growth is. On an appliance, I might arbitrarily hit a bottleneck. I'm at the mercy of how efficient they implemented their features...

@scottalanmiller said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

How does a computer ever know how many users there are? Name any system in the universe that can do this?

Run a simple automated report against your Users OU....

@jaredbusch said in CALs: Silly or Not?:

As Scott said if you did not have CALs this would cost a lot more

I've been in the room when pricing and packaging are being set for a software product.

To be blunt, if you can't afford $130 (ONE TIME) for an employee to use a WinTel/AD network for 5 years (average time between people updating CAL's and migrating OS's) FIRE SOME EMPLOYEES. That's like ~$2 a month. Unless your a thai rice farmer or something crazy the time spent thinking of completely ripping out all windows boxes is likely more expensive than just paying this.

@tim_g said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:

@storageninja said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:

@stacksofplates I can break your 4096 bit encryption with $5.
If your worried about state-level actors you have bigger concerns

Challenge accepted.

Pst me your email and I'll give you a key to break.

Leave me an audit trail so I can confirm.

I assume you'll just ship me a beer and call it even?

@stacksofplates I can break your 4096 bit encryption with $5.
If your worried about state-level actors you have bigger concerns

@scottalanmiller said in Alternative to ESXi Thin VHD:

@emad-r said in Alternative to ESXi Thin VHD:

@storageninja

huh!

You mean running this query command from within an guest linux VM ? and does it needs to have open-vm-tools or vmware tools to be installed right ?

And I did ran this command via SSH on the ESXi host itself.

On the ESXi host itself.

No in guest you can shrink a VMDK with the right stuff set.
Going from memory if you want to shrink a VMDK there are a few requirements.

1.VM hardware version.
2. flags to be set
3. Guest OS supports it (2012R2, and modern RHEL do)
4. Guest OS reclaim triggered or setup (Discard flag required to mount EXT4 for instance)
5. Go read Cody or Cormac's blog on this...

Wait a few months and Jason and I should hopefully write a doc on this (it's on my agenda).

@scottalanmiller said in How do ISPs get business?:

@bigbear said in How do ISPs get business?:

@scottalanmiller said in How do ISPs get business?:

@bigbear said in How do ISPs get business?:

@markferron said in How do ISPs get business?:

@dashrender said in How do ISPs get business?:

I was reading JB's and other talking about getting 100 Mb/s + for around $30-40/month. Others are talking about getting 1 Gb/s for $70/m.

Here in Nebraska in Cox land, 150/20 Mb/s cost $80/m for residential.
100/20 for business costs $350/m

Here in the town I'm in there is only Windstream. 15 Mb/s for $60 a month, ridiculous. Basically government blessed robbery.
The town over I had TruVista and they charged $10/month for the Wi-Fi feature on their modem/router/AP combos. We obviously opted out, but they still charged us $5/month for the modem rental along with $90/month with the fees for 50 Mb/s. These companies make they're money back on the hardware "rental" fees alone.

Windstream is a great example of a company who constantly buys up competitors, even larger ones like Nuvox. In a grander scheme they were acquired by Mcleoud or Paetec, cant remember anymore.

They aren't good about restructuring their networks afterwards like cable operators are. They just keep everything in place.

Paetec. Paetec changed their name to Windstream to hide because they had built such a bad reputation and burned their own brand to the ground.

I think PAETEC bought McLeod and Allworx then Windstream bought PAETEC.

That's what Paetec wanted people to think. Paetec was the buyer, though. That's why it was a big deal that they took on the name of the company that they bought, rather than keeping the name of the parent.

This happens often enough. Avago did this with Broadcom. There were rumors we were going to do a reverse acquisition of our old parent company a while back.

@markferron said in How do ISPs get business?:

So basically, it's impossible to get rid of crappy DSL companies by complaining to your local officials?

In my neighborhood we have 5G getting rolled out (Fiber up and down the street right now). Expecting this to give me a 3rd option beyond DSL/Cable.

@jaredbusch said in IT Support: $ fee's charged:

Is there a minimum time increment that is billed?

15 minutes.

I'm assuming this is remote work. We were always 1 hour minimum for onsite, 15 minutes for a remote.

@emad-r said in Alternative to ESXi Thin VHD:

@networknerd

Using ESXi 6.5 Update 1 + Local Storage, and my storage does not support UNMAP

That's the back end unmap (That you don't need as your backend can't be thin anyways because it's local). You can still SCSI UNMAP from a guest OS to the VMDK.

@dashrender Does your host support HTML5 iDRAC? I'm a big fan of it over the old java stuff.