My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why • Hacker News Board

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#21

Post by jasonkester » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:50 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #15

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

Exactly. If he was paying list price for any of this, there would be a sudden, dramatic increase in price. Which will happen, when BizSpark runs out.

Keep in mind that BizSpark "runs out" when you pass a million dollars per year in revenue. At which point you can presumably afford a thousand dollars for a SQL Server license.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#22

Post by mbesto » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

omni wrote: post #16

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

> What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? You can easily get near 8GB for way under $200/mo using reserved pricing. A one year reservation, heavy utilization m1.large gives you 7.5GB of RAM for $40/mo and $676 up front, or about $100/mo total.

Wait, am I an idiot then? I thought $200/mo just gets you reduced per minute rates? So ~720*0.00x + $200 = $y/mo. As far as I know, there is no way on Amazon to pay a flat monthly fee. It's all "pay for what you drink".

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#23

Post by mjn » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:53 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #21

zdw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If he was paying list price for any of this, there would be a sudden, dramatic increase in price. Which will happen, when BizSpark runs out.

Keep in mind that BizSpark "runs out" when you pass a million dollars per year in revenue. At which point you can presumably afford a thousand dollars for a SQL Server license.

There's also a cap of 3 years, even if you haven't hit $1m revenue yet: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/faqs.aspx#16

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#24

Post by cl8ton » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:55 PM UTC

Our startup diphur.com is 100% Microsoft and also went through the BizSpark program and highly recommend it.

When you exit the program you get to keep all licenses free with all future patches. We exited the program 2 years ago and have yet to buy a MS license for IIS or SQL.

When we upgrade to Windows 2012 which is not free, we will let our business plan we implemented pay for it and choose our MS Server versions according to function.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#25

Post by statictype » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:56 PM UTC

maxhowell wrote: post #8

I'd consider Windows more readily, but you are a bit screwed if you do decide you want to dip in the Open Source pool. You can dip there, but it's harder and less well supported, and some things simply don't work. So you are tying yourself to Windows, and often, Microsoft tools. Fine if you're sure it'll work, but I would feel like I was gambling.

We're building a web-based saas on a Microsoft stack. We use coffeescript, sass, compass in our development environment and it works really well. There are open source libraries for doing REST, unit testing, performance testing and they work pretty well. Node.js and npm run on Windows. Mercurial always has and git now works as well.

What are the components that you miss?

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#26

Post by lmm » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:56 PM UTC

So compare like with like. If you had a similar architecture using open-source equivalents - not trendy mongo/node/etc, just basic Java/postgres - what have you got? A similar, slightly worse language. A much bigger open source library ecosystem. Similar, slightly worse IDEs. Better admin and deployment options. Free licenses forever, rather than until MS decides they want you to start paying.

You can write distributed large-scale SoA under microsoft, and you can write high-performance monolithic applications under open source. Stop conflating two very different issues.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#27

Post by 3pt14159 » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:57 PM UTC

growt wrote: post #13

I don't want to bash microsoft or anything. But 2.5 daily visitors and 1.5k new tickets daily can probably be served by nginx, a raspberry pi and a potato.

500px hosted 10x that on a Mac mini with a USB hard drive when they were starting out.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#28

Post by jitbit » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:57 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

$200 is a m.large instance (7.5.GB) plus the "provisioned i/o" charges (EBS volume).

MS SQL is free since we're in BizSpark.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#29

Post by omni » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:58 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #22

omni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? You can easily get near 8GB for way under $200/mo using reserved pricing. A one year reservation, heavy utilization m1.large gives you 7.5GB of RAM for $40/mo and $676 up front, or about $100/mo total.

Wait, am I an idiot then? I thought $200/mo just gets you reduced per minute rates? So ~720*0.00x + $200 = $y/mo. As far as I know, there is no way on Amazon to pay a flat monthly fee. It's all "pay for what you drink".

I think you actually understand it just fine but might be confusing yourself a bit.

Paying the reservation fee does just get you reduced per minute rates, but the fee is not $200/mo. The reservation fee in this example is $676 for an entire year. Once you pay that, your hourly rate for a single m1.large goes down to $0.056. My final $100/mo total is based on 24/7 uptime on that single server you've reserved.

Re: My startup is Microsoft-based, here's why

#30

Post by jtolj » Mon, Jul 01, 2013, 1:58 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #11

All our stuff runs on one (1) server This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted. That costs us about $200 a month. By the way, that's Amazon What Amazon configuration gets you 8GB or RAM for $200/month?? Am I missing something? Database servers for all o…

>> All our stuff runs on one (1) server > This has nothing to do with MS, but why would you set up such an architecture? If one of the apps hits a memory leak > (their HeatTest project did), than all of your other critical services/apps are interrupted.

It's hard to believe a company would "admit" to running all of these services on a single server. There's no way I would pay for a CRM or Ticketing App (relatively mission critical for many companies) that wasn't highly-available.