Hey Guys,
I'm the guy who created PremiumDrops. The purpose of this post is to explain the reason for the previous PD track record and to address concerns you may have related to future service consistencies. Sorry about the length of the response.
PD has had an on/off track record during BETA stages because it's actually a complex site. Since almost the start, I've had 12 owned servers, 1 rack, 100mbit pipe and several hundred IPs. The service heavily relies on third party data (google, msn, snapnames, pool, namejet, etc) and these data sources are constantly changing and tweaking their output formats, so the scanners need to be constantly adjusted to work with these changes, this is time consuming.
With a system of such complexity (DB servers, web servers, caching servers and scanning servers), and the tens of millions of domains analyzed, and billions of metrics stored, problems are inevitable, especially during BETA which it was in for 2 years.
Since the site didn’t generate any money, I had no immediate incentive to constantly monitor and improve it and I was extremely busy with another non-domain project. It’s a poor excuse, I know. I kept on pushing the updates every month and eventually it caught up with me.
My Level 3 contract expired last month, and I was given an option of either shutting down PD or renewing the contract. I figured that if the site breaks even in terms of the fees, I can renew the contract, hence the major repairs and monthly fee.
Figuring out the monthly price was tough. I wanted to offer a good deal, but at the same time I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t so cheap that everyone would use it. If too many people use it, the data becomes useless. It’s priced well under the competitors and provides many more features.
I also strongly believe that charging for it actually makes the data more valuable, primarily because it limits the amount of people that have access to it.
The new PD is truly feature packed, and that’s just the start. I have a list of at least 30 features I’d like to add in but I’m waiting to make sure the site takes off first.
Additionally, since the site generates revenue, there is now a NEED to monitor it and ensure that everything works perfectly (can’t stand chargebacks!). There is also a need to stay ahead of the competition, hence the future updates. All these things are taken care of (site experienced no outages or down time since switch and all lists are 100% functional).
For those who have purchased from me in the past (Domain Research Tool), you know that my customer support, updates and response time for paying customers are top notch.
Hopefully this will clear things up as far as the poor track record during beta stage and the direction the site is heading.
If you guys have any questions, problems or issues feel free to contact me via PM or e-mail
[email protected].
Thanks!
Luc Lezon
Update: PayPal payment option has been added.
