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Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

ramgrid.com

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Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#71

Post by ewindisch »

Running a hosting business is hard work, I did it for over 10 years. It's under-appreciated, users complain about everything, nobody wants to trust you, and many of the customers you do remain want to bleed your support dry. Some of the most successful hosting companies have succeeded by eliminating SLAs and making support hard to reach. Others such as Rackspace make support easy to get, but make sure the customers pay for the privilege. All of the problems with trying to start a hosting company are clear from the responses here.

One of the problems in this space is that it's a mature market. Developers are accustomed to Amazon, Digital Ocean, Linode, Azure, and GCE. These are mature products and yes, users are skeptical of new entrants that don't do as much, don't have a complete product, or even have put effort into their website. For HackerNews, it's ironic, but clearly this audience is expecting a mature product not a lean approach. (Self-provisioning while now industry-standard requires a significant effort to prevent fraud & abuse, and slow-provisioning is completely in-line with Lean methodologies)

So, some advice:

* Don't give up just because of the bad feedback. Iterate!

* Focusing on devs is probably wrong if you don't have a plan to leverage individual sales to enterprise sales. Individuals pay less and you need more of them. More customers usually equals more support, they're more fickle, and less likely to be retained. Perhaps surprisingly, they're also traditionally seasonal, with dev-based buy-in being strongest during summer.

* Find a hook. Something you do better, or different. For my hosting company, it was virtual servers for only $6/mo, when at the time the lowest priced alternative was $20/mo. We adopted an architecture that allowed us to radically compete on price. It doesn't have to be price, and honestly, it's better that it's not. Also make sure the hook is understood by the market, one of my company's problems was that our low price had us compared to shared hosting or container-based solutions, because virtual servers at that price was too unbelievable.

* Hack trust. Some people here mention trust. Now, I think this is over-valued. People put data with companies they really don't know much about all the time. At some point, nobody knew who Dropbox, Docker, or Digital Ocean were. If, however, this proves to be a problem - and it could be in the current surveillance state - then look at ways to hack trust. For instance, a service such as AWS Lambda has a different threat (and trust) model than EC2, based solely on how developers use these products. If you stick with VM-based hosting, then develop partnerships, get reference customers, bring on staff that the community already knows, loves, and trusts.

Good luck!

Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#72

Post by CM30 »

Well, I'll be honest... I'm not too sure about this service, or the idea behind it. I mean, hosting (both in the 'cloud' and non cloud sense) is a really competitive, cut throat industry with players able (and willing) to spend millions of dollars on advertising and services.

And people kind of want stability in this type of thing. So if you want Ramgrid to do well, you're gonna have to prove you can keep the company going for at least a few years in order to convince people you're reliable. Remember, many hosting companies are fly by night operations (there's even jokes about some of them being set up by high school kids in the summer holidays), and people are hence more than a tad wary of new ventures in this space. Especially when they don't have a big name like Amazon's behind them.

But hey, good luck with the whole thing.

Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#73

Post by mcintyre1994 »

destroyer998 wrote: post #45
al2o3cr wrote: post #17

Marketing page copy: "Unlimited 1GB servers" FAQ when signed in: "Each plan has a maximum capacity for the amount of servers its allowed to create. Due to the significant amount of dedicated resources we provide, we can't literally give you unlimited servers. However, you could upgrade your plan whenever you'd like." So your marketing page is LITERALLY a lie. Good job.

When you click the refund link in the footer, you are presented with a page not found error: https://ramgrid.com/legal/refunds Is this supposed to be scam or a joke?

Also both pages under "For those who may sue us". Actually, just all of that section - you need a ramgrid account to view their refund policy (apparently different to the 404 footer one), or "FOR THE FEDS & CO" law enforcement guide/copyright policy. Also the search bar doesn't work.

Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#74

Post by iheartmemcache »

beachstartup wrote: post #27
hardwaresofton wrote: post #25

Just a note to the makers of ramgrid -- while many of these comments may be harsh, it is probably not in your best interest to respond in anger/defensively. This page is a trove of feedback from potential users of your product. I personally chose a cloud hosting company called INIZ (that I'm extremely happy with) based on comments and a mention on HN -- just trying to let you know, this is your crowd, and they're ang…

just another note. i'm in the infrastructure business. people are incredibly, incredibly cynical about infrastructure, because there are so many bad hosting companies out there. even the good ones are bad. also, people expect top tier services for free or close to free. you can thank amazon for that. your #1 challenge will be to overcome trust issues.

Bunnie Huang had a really interesting take on the evolution of the markets. It was just a 30 second quip, a mere nugget falling from the ingot which was the lecture. This won't do it justice but to paraphrase him he basically said (w/r/t Shenzhen where effectively every retailer is selling a commodity, eventually they bottom out in price-competition) - the way that merchants differentiate themselves is via being "the guy" who can provide services in a reliable fashion. He goes to the same guy every time to pick up his 10k spools of resistors to throw into the pick'n'place even if its a few cents more on the bottom-line to the BOM[1] because he has developed a relationship and reputation with those vendors. I've had some catastrophic failures with Rackspace but even with proof of concepts with one tiny 400/mo box[0] they spent easily 12-15 hours with high-level engineers to help resolve some pretty obscure WAS stuff. I'm pretty sure they ended up bringing in software guys to help, or those Rackspace IT guys had some of the most in-depth and wide-range knowledge I've only seen in people like Brad Fitzpatrick[2]. They really went above and beyond - which is why I don't mind paying 4x what an OVH box might cost.

There are so many shitty engineers, shitty lawyers, shitty automotive mechanics, doctors and hosts out there that your market differentiation can literally be phrased in a sentence: "Be just a little bit more competent & reliable than your lazy competition". I'm not the smartest guy, but being dependable to your customers is certainly worth paying the premium.[3]

[0] I've got a lot of equipment with them so I'd expect that kind of treatment if I was operating under my own account but this was off a brand-new account where a speculator bought an energies trading platform from a distressed company. His IT partner didn't have much WebSphere experience so he brought me in, gave me the company card and asked me to get it to work

[1] Even the high priced merchants in Shenzhen are significantly cheaper than what we get at Digi-key and Mouser :(

[2] In that, you'd be very hard pressed to find an engineer who can code "high level Perl" (it was as high level as web-apps went during the LiveJournal days), could write Memcached, could write kernel patches for network drivers, do UI (though things were admittedly far more simple then), all the while taking care of the physical IT ops (see: Coders at Work, for a fantastic account)

[3] And any client you have who doesn't recognize this, you should choose to fire as soon as possible. They don't see the value in the services you deliver and you surely aren't being compensated appropriately.

Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#75

Post by purplerabbit »

notacoward wrote: post #36

"Never experience the hassle of ... while saving a bunch of money" Wait, you mean that if I don't use your service then I'll have hassles but at least I'll save money? That's how it reads. You seem to expect that people will parse it like this. (never-experience X) while Y Unfortunately, most people parse it like this. never-experience (X while Y) Try each one out on "never experience burning your hand while cooking…

Was going to comment something like this, but you've said it very well. But yeah... The site's grammar is a bit sketch across the board.

Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#76

Post by dmarlow »

nkozyra wrote: post #51
frik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a carbon copy of this template: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing Even the pricing area and the footer text are 100% just a copy. There is certainly not functional hosting service behind that, but maybe it a vehicle to test the water and collect emails of potential customers...

Yikes. Yeah, stay away.

LOL, even the copyright link... which goes to a 404.

Re: Show HN: I recently launched a new cloud hosting company

#80

Post by bdcravens »

bdcravens wrote: post #40

Sign up for a plan: "Still unactivated! Give us a bit more time and then you'll be free to peek around however you'd like." I don't think this is acceptable in 2016.

Hmmm.. still not activated, and I received an email offering a refund.

Too bad, I was looking forward to launching a server, and running the IP address through ARIN. I suspect the service is just software running atop Digital Ocean or AWS.

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