oh, sire, come back, I have a better offer..

I see my mom haggle with a lot of people.. mostly with the street peddlers who come selling near my house.. and on the rare occasions that we go shopping together, the shop owners from cloth shops to grocery stores.. almost everytime she comes back with an amazing bargain.. a lot of the times,  the price she ends up paying is less than half the price quoted by the seller! that kinda bargain happens more with the peddlers than an established store owner, but even there she manages to get a good deal (maybe not as drastic as with a street peddler).. 

and the one thing I've noticed in these haggles is that she always plays like it's the seller who's in desperate need of sellingand not she who needs anything from the seller.. almost like she's doing him a favour by buying his stuff.. so, when she offers a price and the seller doesn't agree, she starts to walk away.. and the seller generally calls her back and either agrees to her price or somthing near that :D 

I can never even come close to that kinda bargaining.. I mostly end up paying the quoted price..

but that's beside the point.. what I wanted to write was about a similar thing that happened to me online.. I was trying to buy some hosting space.. and was generally checking out the prices.. after looking at hostmonster and bluehost, came to StartLogic.. looked at the prices, and they were pretty cheap.. so, thoought of buying from them.. but when I went to the payment page, they were charging me for the entire year in one payment.. having never bought hosting space before, I wasn't sure if this was normal, so thought of looking around a bit more before I decide.. I mean, what if I later find that these guys stink? I'd be either stuck up with them for a year or lose my one year's payment..

so, I try closing the window, and this chat window comes up, with a chatbot on the other side.. it asks me why I'm leaving.. not expecting it to understand a bit of what I was gonna type, I asked it if there was a way I could try their service before I buy.. I don't think the chatbot understood that, but it offered me something interesting anyways.. it gave me about 30% discount!!!

I was like, hmm.. wait.. can they do that?! I mean, just a while ago I was asked to pay like $72/yr. and now everything being the same, I've got to pay just about $48/yr? r u kidding me? I mean, why wouldn't you offer me this in the beginning?! why wait till I try closing the browser window?!

in any case, I dint try closing the browser window again.. just paid up the amount and bought their hosting space :D

it wasn't a bad deal actually.. it was a Pro plan, so I got unlimited space and bandwidth.. and even their support wasnt half bad.. I had a question regarding hosting Rails apps, and they replied back within the next day.. and I didn't even have to buy premium support for that..

now, for the catch.. if I want to continue my account with them for another year, I'd have to pay them $84/yr instead of the $72 (the original price).. or maybe it's the same for everyone and has nothing to with the discount I got.. but in any case, for two years, $132 (= $48 + $84) is still slightly better than $144 (= $72 * 2).. but then, that's not really a significant amount to make a difference.. 

I guess what made a difference was that they made me feel like they gave me a better deal than I'd have gotten otherwise (or probably even against what others would get) and I guess that's where they got me :D  I mean, that's a good psychological trick.. but not sure how sustainable that is.. (in case giving a 30% discount is sustainable, then all the hosting providers definitely are making profits over 50%.. because most people probably end up paying up the actual prices)

and about StartLogic itself, generally it's okay.. my only complaint is that they use vDeck for management, which's not as nice as the management console that I used to get with Pandela (I used to have a Pandela account when it used to be free).. 

oh, and they don't support Ruby/RoR.. that was the question I asked their support.. they said you can't run a Rails/Ruby app with them.. but they were okay with running Python,, it doesn't come preconfigured, so I've to get back to support to get it configured.. 

I thought Python's okay.. that still works for me.. I could build my site with Django/Web2py/.. instead of Rails.. 

and, they don't give you shell access, but then, I haven't heard of many that do.. so, that should be okay too.. 

but I'd really liked to have RoR support and shell access :D