In case you aren’t familiar with it, Woot.net offers one “deal” every day. When that deal is sold out, it is all gone and you can’t get anymore. No new deal takes its place until the next day, when there is once again a new deal for the day. Sometimes the deals are amazing, and sometimes the deals are pretty much the same kind of price you would be able to get anywhere if you just looked around a little bit.

One thing that Woot does on a fairly regular basis is offer refurbished or reconditioned products. A refurbished item is one that has gone from being new, to getting back into the manufacturer’s hands where it is fixed or looked over, and then sold again. Since the device technically is not new, it is labeled as refurbished.

Theoretically, a refurbished item has been restore to “like new” condition, but this is an obvious falsehood since no manufacturer offers the full “like new” warranty on their refurbished products. They know as well as you do that a product that had to be fixed is more likely to have other problems than one that was fine right out of the box the first time. So, you get either no warranty at all, or a much shorter one than normal.

Depending upon what you are buying and how likely it is to break, buying refurbished can be a good way to get a great deal by paying much less than a new product costs for one that is likely just as good. On the other hand, some products aren’t very robust in the first place and paying less for one with a virtually useless warranty is not a good idea. Saving money requires only buying the right kinds of things when they are refurbished. The catch is that it is not always easy to tell which is which.

That brings us to the Refurbished iRobot Roomba. Frequent users of Woot like to joke about how often reconditioned Roobmas show up on the website. It seems that the iRobot Roomba 530 Robotic Vacuum with Virtual Wall seems to show up the most often. When refurbished Roombas show up in a Woot-Off, they bring the special multi-deal day auctions to a screeching halt while it takes hours to sell out.

In fact, I would guess that Woot has to hold off the iRobot folks lest their products fill the site several days each week.

Which begs the question, is buying a refurbished cheap irobot roomba a good idea? Or, are refurbished Roombas a scam?

Unfortunately, the answer is that iRobot Roombas are great little carpet sweeper vacuums when they work properly. However, they are incredibly fragile. The problem is that doing what the Roobma does actually requires more expensive hardware, but people won’t pay more for robot vacuums. That means that iRobot has to try and make do with the fastest manufacturing processes and the cheapest parts.

Frankly, the company has done an admirable job in being able to make a robotic vacuum with all of the features people want at a price they are willing to pay. But, in the end, Roombas are very temperamental and prone to breaking both quickly and often. The company stands behind its products with a one-year manufacturer warranty, which is good. However, since they break a lot, the company ends up with TONS of Roombas that it fixes and then has to resell as reconditioned Roombas or refurbished Roombas.

• If you want to see for yourself, check any of the Roomba forums and you’ll see many Roobma problems that are so common they have names. Do a search for roomba circle dance, roomba battery problem, and roobma cliff sensors, for several examples. (Hint: Ignore all results from ehow.com or fixya.com as they are usually worthless.)

• For an even more useful search include either roomba 4xxx or roomba 5xxx or even roomba 3xxx in your search. This is how Roobma owners and techies refer to the specific problems that plague each series of Roomba robotic vacuums. (The xxx is a place holder. Most problems that happen to any of the 4000 series Roombas happens to all of them whether they are Roomba 4100 Red, Roobma 4105 Sage, or Roomba 4210 Discovery.)

• Or check here for a very active Roomba owners forum where you can read for yourself about not only the issues with Roombas and how to troubleshoot roomba vacuums, but also the fixes which often involve one tiny component such as an internal LED, but renders the entire Rooba robot vacuum useless unless fixed.

Refurbished Roombas are sold with only a 90-day warranty. Basically, the company washes its hands of the ones that were broken by getting them working and shipping them back out with a short warranty that ensures they will likely not have to deal with that particular unit again, which is good, since plenty of new ones are headed back into the factory at any time. For consumers however, it is not so good. If there was a weak solder or connection on one part that is fixed, but the other another has not broken YET, it might also have a weak connection and will break soon, although probably after 90 days.

The question is whether or not this is a self-defeating strategy for iRobot and its attempts to build a market in robotic vacuums. While it may be true that there is no wiggle room in increasing the costs associated with making Roombas, reselling units that are more likely to have trouble than brand new units could very well be creating a population of Roomba owners who will

1. Never buy another Roomba again because the refurbished one they bought broke so quickly
2. Will recommend to friends and neighbors not to buy Roombas because they break too easily
3. Will be willing to buy a robot vacuum from a competitor when technology allows better, longer-lasting, roomba-type vacuums to be built for lower costs
4. And, of course, will tell friends to buy the other brand because it doesn’t break right away like Roombas do

As corporate strategies go, the one iRobot seems to be pursuing is one destined to fail. There are only so many consumers willing to try a robotic vacuum in the first place. Each one of them that is alienated by a faulty refurbished Roomba reduces that pool by one more. While Roomba is the only game in town today, people tend to have long memories of being burned, especially on higher priced items like the iRobot Roombas. That means that when they are easier to develop and sell than they are now, there are going to be plenty of waiting customers for new competitors.

Although it might cost Roomba more on the bottom line in the short-term, the company would be better served for the long-term by offering a full one-year warranty on its refurbished Roombas, just like it does on new ones. Doing so might even allow for them to be sold a higher price than they are now. More importantly, doing so would stop the creation of an army of Roobma haters who think that Roobmas are junk and buying one is just a scam. Perhaps, most useful of all, as refurbished Roombas came back in for service the company could learn what it is that goes wrong most often the second time around and perhaps preemptively “fix” the potential problems on every refurbished Roomba before it goes out the door, resulting in fewer warranty service requests on refurbished Roombas, thus negating the additional expense of servicing them for a longer time.

Of course, that only works if the company is not fully aware that all Roombas are just ticking time-bombs that the company needs to ship and get off of the service life-cycle as quickly as possible to avoid bankruptcy. In which case, there really is no valid strategy, other than to hope that people never wise up.

The author has owned two Roomba vacuums, a Roomba 4100 Red, which worked perfectly for almost three years before the battery died, and a refurbished Roomba 530 which developed the common Roobma problem where when turned on it keeps trying to backup because it thinks its bump sensor has been activated. The author still owns both Roomba, although both gather dust in the corner of the basement because replacing the Roomba Red battery is too expensive, and fixing the 530 Roomba requires near complete disassembly or paying as much as the purchase price to have it fixed. When asked, the author tells people, “When they work, they are pretty great, but they seem to break very easily, so it might not last very long.”

I’ve never seen anyone buy one after I tell them that, and I am not an iRobot Roomba hater. I just can’t justify buying a new one until I start hearing that they are much more reliable.

Are Refurbished Roombas A Good Deal Or A Scam? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

My hope is that others will find this review and point others in this direction so that they can evaluate the FACTS for themselves. My further hope is that this review will inspire others to write up their own comprehensive, fact-based, reviews of other web hosting companies that they have experience with so that we can all start getting the hosting we need without all of the frustration we currently must suffer.

About Web Hosting Company Reviews

There is one thing you must know about web hosts and the people who review them. First, many webhosts, especially the "more popular" or higher volume, hosts offer significant referral fees or other payments to those who send new customers their way.

In other words, if I were to include a referral link with this post, I could get $79 or some other similar amount if you clicked the link and then signed up for hosting services. This is a huge incentive to write glowing reviews and include paid links. So, be very careful about the reviews you read.

Another problem is that people with bad experiences are more likely to go out of their way to both make a big deal out of it, and then to write long, detailed posts about what went wrong. The trouble is, there is no way to know whether this user was wronged, got what they deserved, or maybe was just unlucky. Not even the best company can make every customer happy.

Unfortunately, you have to contrast these long, overblown, tirades with people who insist on chipping in with nothing more than "I’ve use blah-blah hosting for 2 years without any problems."

Just like before, there is no way to know whether or not that user is representative of numerous satisfied customers, or maybe THEY are the lucky one. Or, maybe they have a single, tiny, 5 hits per day, website that you could keep up and running in the background of your laptop if you wanted to.

In other words, the more reviews you read, the more likely you are to come to the conclusion that web hosting companies are just like cell phone companies. They all are terrible at customer service and most of their customers would gladly switch if only they knew for sure it would be any different with another company, but since they all seem to be equally hated, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

The unfortunate thing is that after actually USING a few different web hosts over the last year or two, I’ve learned that there ARE true, comparable, differences between the various web hosting companies. Unfortunately, you’ll never see those tangible differences on any of the so-called web hosting review websites out there.

If you are still reading, don’t despair. There is hope. In addition to being a comprehensive, based on experience, review of Dreamhost, I will also show you how to find the best web hosting companies to try out AND show you how to find out some additional information about any webhosting company you are researching so that you can make the best informed decision you possibly can, and hopefully, save yourself a lot of frustration.

(Yes, it will take multiple parts to cover all of this information. Trust me, it will be worth it. Keep reading. It won’t take long and I’ll bet you a dollar you’ll learn more from this serious than you will from reading a thousand web host reviews.)

Shared Web Hosting Reviews

Like many webmasters and other website developers, I chose a shared hosting plan. A shared hosting plan means that the server running your website also is running the websites for other users. The key element in this equation is that the server be powerful enough to handle the hosting for all users on the server.

The tricky part is that a user who uses virtually no resources today can suddenly start using a lot of resources. The cliché example is that a website that normally gets a low volume of traffic is suddenly hammered thanks to making the front page of Digg, or being "slashdotted" which means being linked to from the very popular Slashdot.com website.

However, this is typically not the issue. Rather, any webhosting company incurs an added expense for each additional server it purchases and runs in its datacenter. Like any business, a webhost’s revenues must exceed its expenses to make a profit and stay in business. Thus, it is necessary for the hosting provider to minimize expenses by only using the number of servers required to properly service its customers. Getting that number right, is the hard part.

If a server is capable of handling 100 customers each using an average of 16 MB of RAM without any disruption of service, then the host will profit the most by placing the full 100 users on each server. Slashdotting or Digg front page aside, a customer may simply become more successful with driving traffic to their site. This may increase their memory usage to 50 MB of RAM. At this point, the host has a choice, either provide an additional shared hosting server and rebalance the load, or hope that other users on the same server use less than the planned for 16 MB of RAM.

There is a nuance here that is difficult for any hosting service to nail down completely. Is the increase in memory usage permanent? How likely are other users to use more memory? How close is the server to its "breaking point" at this load? Are there other shared servers with more room to spare, and if so, would moving this user, or other users, to that server solve the problem. And so on.

How the hosting company responds to this issue determines how good of a shared hosting provider they are. A shared host company that maintains a large buffer to the end of the server’s resources and errors on the side of more servers (and more expenses) is a web host that will be more stable and, frankly, a better host.

A shared hosting plan provider that chooses instead to error on the side of fewer servers (and lower expenses) is more likely to get the complicated calculus of server resources wrong and thus suffer more downtime, outages, and the like.

There is another option available to web hosting companies. It’s called the Terms of Service, and it is where the real limitations on your shared hosting account are. This will be true of virtually all shared hosting plans.

Make sure you are comparing apples to apples. There are a few different types of webhosting out there and they are very different in how they work.

Any web hosting plan that offers you "unlimited" traffic or disk space is a shared hosting plan.

That is because all of the other types provide you an actual guarantee about exactly how much system resources you get to use. You can’t offer unlimited if you are actually going to try and live up to it.

That should tell you something very important. All hosting except shared hosting comes with an actual guaranteed amount of resources that you get, and they provide much lower limits and they cost more. In other words, those numbers on shared hosting plans aren’t just technically incorrect, they are simply not truthful.

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Unbiased Web Hosting Company Review – Just The Facts is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

What have I found so far? It seems that a lot of writers out there who claim to be professional writers aren’t that good. People seem AMAZED at my writing, and frankly while I think it is good, I’m not sure it is amazing. I guess it is all based on comparison though. The other thing is that many writers out there don’t know how to behave in the business world. I get thanked, that’s right THANKED, for calling people back or responding to their emails, or questions. I work for you, remember?

Apparently though that is the exception rather than the rule. It would seem the bar is set pretty low in professional writing. That must be why I see so many writing ads that seem comical in how much qualifications they try and get. My personal favorite is the recent post looking for someone with 7 to 10 years experience in writing in an online university setting. Um…guys? 10 years ago was 1998. When do you think the whole online university thing really got going? eCollege is the first one I remember and they MIGHT have been around in 1998, but they were the only ones.

That’s a pretty small candidate pool if you are only willing to hire people who worked for eCollege in 1998. So, I’ve started ignoring the job qualifications and just applying based on whether or not it sounds like something I want to write about. I keep getting responses, so I guess they can’t find those guys. I wonder if other fields work like this. Do you think an engineer ever looks at a posting for someone with at least 10 years experience with hybrid-cars?

Professional Writing is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC