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Despite my reading of HN, I've never really paid much attention to YC, but this data makes me ask: Are all YC companies web apps? Are there no infrastructure companies, or other types of services?
Despite my reading of HN, I've never really paid much attention to YC, but this data makes me ask: Are all YC companies web apps? Are there no infrastructure companies, or other types of services?
That said, you've specifically mentioned infrastructure, and I don't think an infrastructure company would be possible in the YC model. It would take a vast amount of money to start a new hosting provider or cloud provider, if you aren't building on existing infrastructure (which a few YC companies have done, building on EC2 and other cloud provider products, including recently acquired Heroku and Cloudkick). YC invests a few thousand dollars. Building infrastructure costs millions of dollars. Building software is what YC companies do, and the best place to build most software today is on the web.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically, anyone hosting their site on EC2 will appear to have a fantastic response time, compared to anyone else. Which makes the test mostly useless for comparison between startups (though it could be interesting/valid data for a single startup over time, which is what pingdom sells)
I'm just one guy so I have to start somewhere :] Sometime soon though, it will be possible to select the location.
Gabriel wrote about our services on his blog http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/12/testing-cdn-perf...
Response time data is useless without other data: - Where are the monitors located? - Where are the sites located? - How was the site monitored? Did they account for DNS lookup and connection times in this time? 8ms for skysheet.com makes me think no? - Are error times rolled into these times? Errors typically will respond quickly. Having built www.yottaa.com, we worked hard to provide data that users can easily take…
Since 80% of performance is front-end, I find it's often more interesting to look at rendering time instead. Most websites can get the html back to you in a few hundred milliseconds. The more interesting question is how long it will take the browser to download and render the associated resources. This is the pain your visitors will be feeling and probably the one you should focus on. Instead of trying to get your server response down from 500ms to 200ms, focus on getting your onload time down from 5 seconds to 2.
One great open-source tool for measuring front-end performance is http://www.webpagetest.org/. It allows you to test sites from various locations around the world in and it gives you detailed performance data, waterfall graphs and even videos of the page loading. One downside is that it is IE only but it does support IE6-IE9.
Here is a sample report for Adioso on a DSL connection in Dallas in IE7: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110111_ZF_27134dc481325cfa...
As a disclosure, I'm the founder of a web performance company and sponsor the Ireland instance for WebPageTest although I have no financial benefit from promoting them.
Despite my reading of HN, I've never really paid much attention to YC, but this data makes me ask: Are all YC companies web apps? Are there no infrastructure companies, or other types of services?
This should be a solid example that not everyone in YC is creating just a webapp that you can thrown onto a few EC2 instances in under 10 minutes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically, anyone hosting their site on EC2 will appear to have a fantastic response time, compared to anyone else. Which makes the test mostly useless for comparison between startups (though it could be interesting/valid data for a single startup over time, which is what pingdom sells)
I'm just one guy so I have to start somewhere :] Sometime soon though, it will be possible to select the location.
Build an image, load it onto a bunch of Pogoplugs, send them out to some friends who live in various parts of the world (and various parts of the US with various kinds of broadband!)