Hot answers tagged cloud
7
The short answer here is no. When signing up for these services the agreement you sign will almost certainly contain a clause as part of the SLA (service level agreement) that their financial liability can't extend beyond the amount you paid for the service while it was down. That is, if you pay $31/month for a service and it is down for a full day, you ...
6
Technically, DropBox is using the Freemium approach. You have a certain level where it's free, but if you start using more than the average user, you are asked to pitch in a bit.
Dropbox does this with storage space, but there are a lot of ways you can actually track this (Maybe bandwidth is a larger cost for you, charge based on that).
This is one thing ...
5
Do you know Microsoft BizSpark? You can get all the software you want during three years for a one time 100$ fee + free hours on Windows Azure.
Registration is very easy. If I remember well, all you need is to be a young company with less than $1M revenue and have a corporate email.
Even if you do no want to use Azure, it is still worth it for the ...
3
Mnn, respectfully, I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Don't price based on what your manufacturing cost is; price on what the value is for your end customer.
So the fact that you're hosted on EC2 is immaterial to your pricing. You can, if you want to, explain this in an FAQ somewhere, only to provide some reassurance that you're ...
3
I wouldn't look at it that way. Select the provider with the best uptime record, don't think of it in terms of getting money back afterwards, it'll never cover the true cost.
As an aside, I used Amazon US East and Eu and the quality of the EU service is great, US East has been variable over the several months I've monitored them. So I put my critical system ...
3
Over the last 10 years I've helped take a web based startup to $1bn market cap in 10 years. Being responsible for the in-house software development, sys-admins and the co-located infrastructure meant that we had to worry about everything. Sometimes that hurts.
Platform as a Service
DotCloud, Heroku and PHPFog are a few of the new breed of services known ...
2
Amazon offers a similar platform as a service, Elastic Beanstalk. DotCloud does just use Amazon EC2 btw.
But Elastic Server offers the same idea, one layer up. You put together the platform using standard packages, but you can get the same server packaged for Amazon, Xen, VMWare, etc. It's generic components on a generic platform, about as abstracted as you ...
2
As @Alex indicates, it depends entirely on the agreement negotiated (or not for us small fries) between you and them, as with any provider of services to your company, be they a telco, cloud provider, SaaS vendor, etc.
If you're a bit larger, or have a good relationship with a provider, significant problems can be escalated resulting in what essentially ...
2
A detailed discussion of hosting options would be off-topic here, but what is very much on-topic is this: focus on finding customers and stop worrying about scaling until later.
Let's put it more succintly: in all likelihood, during your first month of operations, you'll be serving about 100 visitors a day. Can your current setup handle it? Of course. So, ...
2
We had a web based CRM system developed in C# running on ASP.NET with SQL Server 2005 (now sold on to another company).
We initially hosted on it on Discount ASP (http://www.discountasp.net) and the site worked ok, it is a basic cheap service. We ocassionally had big wait times to connect to SQL Server
We eventually purchased our own Dell servers that we ...
2
Impossible to determine without hard facts about the application, codebase and complexity.
For example, there are tons of articles on the interweb talking about how to support high traffic sites using wordpress on commodity aws instances. Whether or not you can support thousands of requests depends on what plugins / caching / apache/nginx settings are set ...
2
"We'll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too," a note on Quora’s website explained, according to CNET. "We'd point fingers, but we wouldn't be where we are today without EC2."
I agree with that sentiment. The Amazon outage affected us at contentcrooner.com too. But even so, we have had physical servers fail in the past too. Downtime has been ...
1
It's hard to say without more details.
It's much more likely that other cost factors will dominate your calculation. If you're not trying to engage in a business that requires costly computing resources (HPC or equivalent) or vasts amount of bandwith (like YouTube), I bet hosting costs are close to irrelevant.
This is not saying that AppHarbor won't grow ...
1
I don't know the stats but I know that it's becoming more and more acceptable in the enterprise. One of our Fortune 500 clients just agreed to allow us to host data on Amazon S3 & CDN's which I think is a first for their organization.
I think there are still plenty of companies that design software to be installed in the enterprise but also have a ...
1
You need (your lawyer needs) to think about whether and how your Terms of Service and End User License Agreement should be customized to take into account use of your software in many different countries.
For example, there are significant differences between countries as concerns which activities can make you subject to which of their laws; privacy ...
1
Even if the users owned the music on CD it would still be illegal in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_v._MP3.com
UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y.
2000) was a landmark case before Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York concerning the
Internet. The case ...
1
Using Parse or Cloudmine is perfectly viable, and does indeed allow you to focus on the product rather than a complex backend. In many situations, such a flexible solution might actually be preferable to creating a backend that may need to change significantly as the product changes during it's early stages.
1
Great question and good point about focusing on the app itself. There are more and more BAAS companies every day, and it might be a good idea to consider them, although I haven't looked into their prices.
On the other hand, if you want to prototype fast, and cheap in the same time, why don't you just forget about the scalability issues of your backend ...
1
Europe does not have a 100 percent policy against cloud computing. Otherwise you wouldn't have data centers in Europe. That's absurd. For example, cineca hosts a huge data center for Italian universities.
Were cloud computing voted against 100%, you wouldn't have events about it like http://cloudexpo-europe.com/ last year. Google wouldn't be opening a ...
1
I use WinHost for hosting my ASP.NET applications. For the money (dirt cheap), they provide the best value out there, and IMO most stable and mature than discountASP. The pitfalls you speak of are minimal, you can run in full trust, choose your framework version, and on and on, and it's all automated. When I launched trivlike.com I used them with the plan to ...
1
Don't waste your time to different shitty cloud solutions. I made a lot's of analysis whether to host my app on the cloud to dedicated server and got conclusion that dedicated server is much more cheaper, gets you more cpu\memory\bandwidth\control, it fails less (just google for how much time AWS was down this year).
Take a look at ...
1
I would suggest a small Windows box on Amazon EC2. This leave some flexibility. You haven't shelled out for hardware, and you can scale up if you need to support more traffic.
If you pay simply by the hour this will cost:
$0.12 per hour for 8760 hours (1 year)
TOTAL £1051 per year ($86.60 pcm)
If you pay for a reserved instance for a year, the total ...
1
Custom work is expensive - for whatever it is you want to do.
Basically, you need to evaluate the amount of custom work to take an existing CMS and modify it to suit your needs (e.g. Drupal) versus the cost of developing the whole site from scratch. In the vast majority of cases, it would be cheaper to use an existing platform.
While I disagree with Ryan ...
1
It certainly depends on exactly what you need. If the features exist in an existing CMS systems than it would be much cheaper to go with a packaged CMS. Custom CMS is usually wrong, go with a popular CMS and add on to it or modify it. Open source CMS have had hundreds of people with thousands of hours invested in them.
Much more than the company you are ...
1
I worked with a "company" for a year and all of their employees were contractors. I believe (now please correct me if I am wrong) to be a contractor the only thing truly needed is a 1099 MISC. However, I don't really know about what it takes if you are going to turn your "business" into an LLC.
1
Other answers have been for cloud hosting services. Is that what you were looking for? There is also Windows Azure, which you can get free usage of via Microsoft's BizSpark program for startups. That would be the way to go if you're a .NET developer.
Or were you asking about cloud based SaaS services (like salesforce.com) that would help you run your ...
1
For file storage and backups, checkout jungledisk.com - they basically provide a usable UI on top of Amazon's S3 storage cloud - works like a charm, is inexpensive, and doesn't go down. I've used it for over a year now, and am very happy with it.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
