There has been a fair bit of change in the international exchange rates since October - the US dollar has slid while the Australian dollar has risen. Hence the rates have been changed: the database now accepts servers costing up US$55 rather than US$50, and AUD$55 rather than AUD$60. This leaves us with an unusual coincidence: the cut off is now the same for the US, Canadian and Australian dollars!

A new entry has been added from CPC Technologies - we have another two to come in the pipeline, hopefully soon.

Once again, our thanks to the forty or fifty people who visit daily and who have been twittering and blogging about us. We still haven't been picked up by Google, so receving your attention is much valued by us.

Since we fixed the bad email server setup, we've been seeing a few emails coming in with suggestions for additions - thank you very much for these! We had to add programming support to the site for Canadian dollars in order to add one of the more infamous Canadian dedi providers HostMDS who currently have a fairly dreadful reputation due to some severe recent outages. They do however offer the lowest dedi server price we've ever seen - a 667Mhz Pentium 3 for just CAD$7.99/month which is just plain crazy cheap.

We also added a reasonable offer from MegaNetServe which are a Silicon Valley (California) outfit - we really wish that providers would give more thought to balance and not hobble their low end dedis with at least one really awful feature. We know that these are the lowest of the low products, but why supply a perfectly good server in every area except its CPU or its network transfer or its RAM? It's a waste of an offering, and it smacks of loss leader pricing where you tempt people in with the intention of making them upgrade later after they have expended lots of time on setup.

In fact just yesterday we here at lowenddedi.net were dealing with a well known cheap memory supplier on eBay. We, because we occasionally suffer from bouts of stupidity, tried buying cheap RAM again having forgetten our last bad experience a few years ago only to find that the supplied sticks have bad chips. Upon trying to return them, the eBay supplier is claiming that there can be nothing wrong with them and it is motherboard incompatibility despite us testing the sticks in two separate motherboards (and finding the same bad memory address ranges). However, they kindly offered to "upgrade" our order (at "no profit" to them) to a "brand leader" memory stick by paying an extra fee - which guess what, makes them about the same cost as if we just bought the sticks from crucial.com in the first place.

This kind of loss leading business model is wrong on many counts, but it is so common because it works thanks to greed and gullibility. I luckily didn't spend much on the cheap RAM, and they are one of the biggest eBay sellers of cheap RAM used by thousands every week. Caveat emptor as always!