Have you ever taken a sales call where you absolutely knew you could solve the prospective customer’s pain for a reasonable investment (that in the long run would actually save them money), only to have them drop their mouth to the floor and complain your solution(s) are too expensive?
The next time I get a phone call to go over hacker clean up, server hardening, server administration where the prospective customer is more concerned over the $100.00 per hour rate than the problem costing them customers and potentially their business, I hope remember to share with them this article.
Imagine reading Service Suspension – Ongoing unanswered abuse complaints thinking to yourself, the person is in a jamb…. I hope they get someone who can really help them (maybe we could, not sure), then later on reading the person who initiated the post also runs a “All you can Eat” (i.e. unlimited support tickets, unlimited labor time) server administration business where they advertise a long list of what they can do for you for just $15.00 per month. I guess, they are so packed with work they could not solve their own problems.
Imagine, for just $15.00 per month you “24/7/365 USA-Based Technical Support” plus “24/7/365 Server Monitoring (5 Minute Intervals)” of your servers plus “Guaranteed 15 Minute Response On Monitoring Alerts” and so much more… sounds like a great deal? Right?
Now, I’m sure if you did a study of people who have heard and even believe in the quote, “you get what you pay for,” or variations of it, the percentage would be high.
Yet, how many actually do their homework to determine if something is really to good to be true?
For example, would you know right away that $15.00 per month for 24×7 coverage 365 days per year with a guaranteed response time of 15-minutes and unlimited administrator work (i.e. unlimited hours of work per month) was a deal too good to be true?
What if they removed the word, “unlimited,” and only included one hour per month? Would it then be more realistic?
In order to answer that question, what’s the going hourly rate for a server administrator? For a security administrator?
In the United States, for a server administrator, the going hourly rate ranges from $30.00 per hour to $52.00 per hour; for security administrators, the hourly rate ranges from $38.00 per hour to $56.00 per hour. In both cases, that doesn’t include benefits.
If a company is saying you get just even one hour for $15.00 when the going rate for an experienced party is $30.00 to $38.00 at a minimum….. get the picture?
You might get marketing speak that the employees multi-task and can work on many tasks at the same time… but isn’t that like someone who worked 2,000 real hours putting down 6,000 billable hours?
What are your thoughts on this subject? Did you purchase time thinking the rate was good or even average only to find out you were taken in by a “too good to be true” event? Let us know your thoughts below.