REC takes advantage of people with low incomes and bad credit. Tell me what the heck is the point of paying monthly payments for an item that you have to hand back? Why dont i just save the money and buy the item for much cheaper with cash? Or why dont i use a credit card with a decent interest rate instead? Its because anyone who could do any of those things would not use rent a center.

It takes advantage of people who cant afford to buy these material things.
So instead of paying 100 dollars a month for the new tv on a credit card, why not pay us 50 instead? The difference is after 5 or so months you would of bought the tv on the credit card, with rent a center you get nothing and have to hand it back in.

If your credit is too low to get a decent credit card its because of doing stupid stuff like this. You don’t go and spend money that you cant afford too waste on something so trivial. Save up some cash and purchase the item. Pay your bills on time, and then avoid getting taking advantage of by scum like REC. Its time for the poor and minorities to smarten up and stop letting people like this take advantage of them.

I do know that “everyone” oversells, and it’s how you manage it that counts. Just like airlines and any industry that has a lot of no-shows. I was mainly just trying to get the word out to people who don’t know. My missives are aimed at non-technicians. The guru programmers and developers already know they’re smarter than I am, or at least think they are, so there’s little point in my trying to school them.

That aside, who knows, someone might hire me sometime who uses your hosting, so I may see it again that way, too. Despite the problems I had, I can say with near certainty that your site admin stuff was not nearly as lame as Godummy’s, so you can rest assured of that.

And elsewhere the idea of cloud computing is intriguing and hot nowadays, although we’ve seen enough incidents to know that it’s promising but not a panacea.

First off, every web hosting company oversells, that is how shared hosting works. It is the same as a phone company or cell company, do you think that if everyone talked on their phone at the same time the network would stay up? It would not, but they know that will never happen. It is the same thing with hosting companies, we know what our clients on average use and we build systems that will work for our clients at a cost effective price.

That said that doesn’t mean all hosts do it right, every host has a balance between performance and profit. With Site5 our aim is performance, and the main reason is that most of our customers are willing to pay a little more for that performance and dependability. Plus 80% of our clients are programmers, designers, ruby on rails advocates, and exp webmasters who have more sites and usage than most.

If you need dedicated resources so that you are not sharing a system with other people you need a VPS or a dedicated server.

I’d be happy to answer any questions you have too, I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I know a lot of people get really upset about overselling and there are a lot of misunderstandings floating around,
Thanks, Ben
Site5 CEO

PS, I’m sorry to hear you had problems with us Dave, feel free too shoot me an email at Ben@Site5.com, I’d be happy to give you a free six months so you can see the difference. I’m one of the new owners who took over last year. I can’t imagine anyone ignoring a problem like that, but I wasn’t around back then.

That’s a fair point about the cost of risk – obviously in your business you get a lot of returns, and that must be figured into your business plan.

I will also agree that your business is surviving because you are meeting desires of customers. Where we part company is that I believe that although you’re providing something desirable, I believe it has a predatory element. To illustrate, a much more extreme example of that would be selling cigarettes, definitely desirable to many, and entirely legal, but is it healthy? In the case of RAC, it’s more benign, of course, but I don’t believe that it’s healthy or sensible to buy or even rent toys when one can’t really afford it.

I will let RAC off the hook in one respect – they did not create this insatiable desire for More Stuff (unless maybe some of their ads really are killer?), that’s a larger sociological problem. They simply take advantage of it in a legal, free market manner.

All that said, I believe it’s no coincidence that RAC’s are often in the poorest neighborhoods. I suppose I could write another article on how the lottery is similarly getting mountains of money from people that shouldn’t really be buying the tickets. And an article about check-cashing stands… on and on ad infinitum.