Huh. My experience is the opposite. I mean, the smallest plan gets a lot of questions, but that is because, with the default install I give you, it just doesn't work very well (which is why I make ordering it... harder. I guess it was kinda a joke, mostly 'cause I like the feel of the five dollar price point; irrational, but it ended up working out quite well[1]) My second smallest plan (that's all of a dollar more with twice the ram) is pretty quiet, as are the 256 and 512 plans.
Really, I think it's a matter of setting expectations, and then sticking to your guns when people want more support than you are selling. "If the service is unsuitable for your needs, I can cancel your account and give you your last month's payment back" - most people, especially on the low end, seem to find this attitude acceptable.
It's really important, I think, to make sure that you don't treat your difficult customers better than your easy customers... I don't think I'm 100% on this yet, but I think it's super important. You choose your customers; if you give better service to people that are hard to deal with than the quiet easy customers, what sort of customer do you think you will end up with? That's one of the reasons I'm really generous with the 'if you want to no longer be my customer, I can give you back your last month' - I also try really hard in the case of outages that if I give anyone a credit, I give all effected customers credit.
I find that the smaller customers are much more accepting of my "I handle the (virtual) hardware, you handle beyond that" support model; usually it's the higher dollar customers that keep coming back wanting me to tune their apache config or re-install the os. I mean, they can do all those things (at least if they could do all those things on a dedicated server with a boot-cd in the cd-rom drive.)
The larger customers are also (quite rightly, I think) far more likely to make noise when disk I/O is suboptimal. I mean, to be fair, it is a problem. (I do not know if it's a worse problem with me than with other providers; I doubt it. We're all using pretty similar hardware. I do know that it is a big problem with shared 7200rpm disk in general. Disk shares poorly.) But the smaller dollar customers? they don't complain nearly as often as my high dollar customers; if you are using it as a shell replacement, a little disk latency just isn't that big of a deal; I mean, ram is cheap enough that a whole lot of stuff can be stuck in pagecache, and that's way faster than the fastest disk. But if you are running a fifty gigabyte MySQL database that is under heavy use? well, perhaps a virtual environment is not the best place to put it.
I also have a much higher margin (cost of goods sold, anyhow) on the small guests; I charge $1 per 64MiB ram plus $4/account/month, so the total cost per megabyte drops pretty sharply with volume. When I started, my under $10 VPSs were unbeatable deals; at this point, my cost per megabyte ram is still pretty competitive for my larger guests, but I'm getting overtaken on the low end, so I think it's time for me to drop prices and/or increase resources on the small guests. I'm not sure what I'll do with that yet, but I do know I need to do something. I feel like that used to be /my/ market and I want it back.
i guess you make it pretty clear that you only serve people who know their stuff in your cheap offerings. that is a different audience than a "send email cards" audience would be.
well, yeah; I'm going for people that know how to use the product I'm selling, and that understand the line I'm drawing between what I handle and what they handle.
Without that strong line between my responsibility and yours, every support question becomes a negotiation; finding people that are both good at negotiation and good technically is extremely difficult, at least without spending just gobs of money.
But the important bit, I think, is that I'm concisely explaining "my product does X" to a certain group, then I'm attempting to exclusively market to that group. I don't know how you would do that with a email card sending service, but I bet that if you figured out how to do that, the "concisely explain to a certain group what exactly your product does and does not do, then market exclusively to that group" process would lower support costs, by reducing the number of people expecting non-standard services.
Really, I think it's a matter of setting expectations, and then sticking to your guns when people want more support than you are selling. "If the service is unsuitable for your needs, I can cancel your account and give you your last month's payment back" - most people, especially on the low end, seem to find this attitude acceptable.
It's really important, I think, to make sure that you don't treat your difficult customers better than your easy customers... I don't think I'm 100% on this yet, but I think it's super important. You choose your customers; if you give better service to people that are hard to deal with than the quiet easy customers, what sort of customer do you think you will end up with? That's one of the reasons I'm really generous with the 'if you want to no longer be my customer, I can give you back your last month' - I also try really hard in the case of outages that if I give anyone a credit, I give all effected customers credit.
I find that the smaller customers are much more accepting of my "I handle the (virtual) hardware, you handle beyond that" support model; usually it's the higher dollar customers that keep coming back wanting me to tune their apache config or re-install the os. I mean, they can do all those things (at least if they could do all those things on a dedicated server with a boot-cd in the cd-rom drive.)
The larger customers are also (quite rightly, I think) far more likely to make noise when disk I/O is suboptimal. I mean, to be fair, it is a problem. (I do not know if it's a worse problem with me than with other providers; I doubt it. We're all using pretty similar hardware. I do know that it is a big problem with shared 7200rpm disk in general. Disk shares poorly.) But the smaller dollar customers? they don't complain nearly as often as my high dollar customers; if you are using it as a shell replacement, a little disk latency just isn't that big of a deal; I mean, ram is cheap enough that a whole lot of stuff can be stuck in pagecache, and that's way faster than the fastest disk. But if you are running a fifty gigabyte MySQL database that is under heavy use? well, perhaps a virtual environment is not the best place to put it.
I also have a much higher margin (cost of goods sold, anyhow) on the small guests; I charge $1 per 64MiB ram plus $4/account/month, so the total cost per megabyte drops pretty sharply with volume. When I started, my under $10 VPSs were unbeatable deals; at this point, my cost per megabyte ram is still pretty competitive for my larger guests, but I'm getting overtaken on the low end, so I think it's time for me to drop prices and/or increase resources on the small guests. I'm not sure what I'll do with that yet, but I do know I need to do something. I feel like that used to be /my/ market and I want it back.
[1]news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3865250