mostly it's a filter. If you can't make an OpenSSH public key, you should probably not be managing your own VPS, and you should certainly not sign up with me, as all my interfaces are command-line only, and I don't have a nice GUI web control panel like many competitors do, and my support is email-only. go, pay the extra bucks, pay slicehost, and get someone to talk you through it on the phone. I don't charge enough to deal with that sort of thing.

If you wanted to hire me by the hour, that'd be different, but we're talking about people giving me $8/month.

Your line makes more sense now, since you're talking about a different situation from the article. It's a different relationship; since anything you do would have to benefit the many of your users at once to be worthwhile, it makes sense to have users who are similar to each other, ie, to say no to the outliers.

Yeah. a successful product business involves a whole lot more 'no' than a consulting business.

However, I think even when working by the hour, when I charge what I seem to be able to charge lately, I try to say "No, that's outside of my area of competence" because really, they are paying me way too much for me to 'figure it out.'

When it is in my area of competence, I think it's just as important to say "No, I think that's a bad idea, and here's why" - They are paying me silly rates, presumably because I know more than they do about what we are trying to get done; Sure, sometimes you need to translate the technical choice into a business decision and push it up the chain, but sometimes it's a purely technical decision, and within your realm of knowledge, and in that case, I am not doing my job unless I say "Don't do that" when the customer asks me to do something that is clearly incorrect.