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Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System

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Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System

#2
Gah... I just got the email announcing Linode and SMS support, jumped up and down, visited the site... and found the cheapest plan to be $100/mo.

Sorry guys. I much prefer your service (assuming SMS + Linode), but thats way to expensive. Pingdom FTW. :(

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System

#4
post #2

Gah... I just got the email announcing Linode and SMS support, jumped up and down, visited the site... and found the cheapest plan to be $100/mo. Sorry guys. I much prefer your service (assuming SMS + Linode), but thats way to expensive. Pingdom FTW. :(

to be fair, pingdom isn't going to supply you with details about cpu, bandwidth, disk, memory, etc usage for a multi-node deployment - they'll just tell you when its down.

i do think the prices are high, and you could certainly go it alone w/ nagios et al, but cloudkick offers a capable and detailed monitoring infrastructure that plugs into many outlets out-of-box. thats pretty cool if you ask me.

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System

#6
It looks like a great service but at that pricing it almost exactly doubles my hosting cost. I can get "good enough" with cacti, nagios and pingdom. I can see expensive plans for enterprises moving to the cloud, but for small founders and ISV's an extra $100 could buy five more Linode instances.

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System

#7
post #6

It looks like a great service but at that pricing it almost exactly doubles my hosting cost. I can get "good enough" with cacti, nagios and pingdom. I can see expensive plans for enterprises moving to the cloud, but for small founders and ISV's an extra $100 could buy five more Linode instances.

Back in the day I was very penny-wise and pound-foolish -- it was practically my tagline. In some ways I still am. But I've learned about reimplementing stuff outside my core competencies.

It doesn't matter that $100 or whatever sounds like a lot of money to me, or that $100 can buy a lot of slices or software or pizza for that matter. What does matter is that setting up cacti/nagios/etc takes time. That is time where I could be doing things that actually make money, like fun SEO work or intellectual-stimulating-as-watching-paint-dry-but-sure-as-heck-profitable button A/B testing.

A single A/B test which offered a 3% lift anywhere pays for $100 a month, and for companies or individuals operating above my scale, you have even less of a bar to waltz over. I also typically don't have to maintain those (gif files break remarkably seldom in my experience compared to software), where getting more software running just increases the number of things that can need tweaking or go wrong next month.

Now, you're almost certainly a better sysadmin than I am, so maybe knocking together some cacti/nagios scripts is really, really fast for you. But I'm betting the best use of your time is probably more effective than doing this.

Re: Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System

#9
post #8

I wonder if it isn't a waste of energy to integrate with 10 different providers and to keep up with all API changes and being forced to find the best way to abstract all the different features of the providers into one interface...

It is if you're having to do it for your own stuff, but if someone else is making it their job, that's a valuable service so long as it gets you out of being locked into vendors cloud solutions.

If they are charging on an annual basis less than it would cost to switch your codebase between any one set of providers, then you're getting a deal.

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