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Unfortunately, all of these require that you be part of some accelerator or receive VC funding before you can take advantage of the discounts. Founders trying t
by curun1r 11y ago
Unfortunately, all of these require that you be part of some accelerator or receive VC funding before you can take advantage of the discounts. Founders trying to bootstrap a company without external funding are SOL.
It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups who try to manage costs to get to profitability more quickly.
- robzyb 11y agoCloud hosting companies are making logical choices. They care about a company's growth, not its profit. They'd rather get $1M/annum from an unprofitable VC-backed company than $100k/annum from a profitable bootstrap.
- smallegan 11y agoBizspark does not require you to be part of an accelerator. I've used it with two separate startups without any external funding.
- iolothebard 11y agoBizSpark requires a 5 minute write up. It's comically easy to get accepted as an individual if you can string together a few sentences. Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.</old man>
- geoka9 11y ago"Deploy a Linux VM on Azure. Azure supports a wide range of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Chef and Puppet." Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS stacks?
- ewindisch 11y agoMy experience has been positive. Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead of the curve. As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual, such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name, then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.
- devsquid 11y agoGCN and AWS both have very easy drop in Docker support. I'm not sure how it could get any easier.
- ewindisch 11y agoYes, they do, but Azure beat them to offer first-class support and did so with their own Docker-API compatible endpoint. This was back around the first Dockercon in 2014. Rackspace had a similar integration at the time, but I was definitely more impressed by what Azure was doing.
- ewindisch 11y agoUpdate: I just noticed that in the past few months, Azure has eliminated this weird DNS thing with the introduction of a revised API and are phasing out the old service as "classic". I'm actually looking at moving some of my infra (containers) to Azure with their Bizspark program which offers a $750/mo credit for startups.
- andrewstuart 11y agoI use Azure for Linux and like it alot. You should try it.
- brbsix 11y agoJust out of curiosity, what's not reassuring about Azure, other than the fact that they seem to think Chef and Puppet are Linux distributions?
- devsquid 11y agoBesides not being very reassuring, its quite expensive. People on HN always want to believe its affordable, I don't get it. Like you can go to the site and see that it's quite an expensive cloud service.
- amorphid 11y agoIf you want to use Microsoft Software, BizSpark is great. I've signed up a couple times for a couple different entrepreneurial endeavors of mine. Super easy. Always free.
- TheLogothete 11y agoYou can sign up for bizspark without a registered company?
- aprdm 11y agoyes, did that, got accepted.
- devsquid 11y agowut?? Azure is about 30-50% more expensive than AWS or GCN. I look around every time I have a new client, look for yourself. I think they've just won favor of startups recently because they've been subsidizing their cloud costs. If theres one thing Microsoft has, its business savvy.
- ogsharkman 11y agoI am consistently surprised by Azure pricing when I look to spin new stuff up (luckily I'm not paying for it). Not to mention I lose connectivity to some of my v12 sql databases randomly.
- devsquid 11y agowell to be sure not to get locked in then.
- tobias3 11y agoIt is not only expensive, it is also really slow. If you want a VM that compares to a 10$ droplet (i.e. with SSD) you are paying five times that.
- cdcarter 11y agoActually, Bizspark requires neither. It's a great way to get resources while you're still figuring out what your idea really is.
- CryoLogic 11y agoI was able to get one of my websites on Azure hosting when I formed an LLC to manage it. I just had to send out a few emails to developer advocates until one could hook me up. Granted, I'm on Digital Ocean now for my sites (most more cost effective) - but it was fun to play around with while it was free.
- manigandham 11y agoThat's absolutely not true. All of these providers have multiple levels. There's a cheap option of usually a few hundred or thousand then the upscale option with 5 or 6 figures over a year. We got into higher tier AWS Activate for $25k/year by just asking. Then we worked with a MS Azure evangelist to get us into the $120k/year program. We would've made it but declined because we asked Softlayer and they gave us $120k/year first and their network was a better fit for us. Lesson: JUST ASK. There are entire teams of people at these companies who are working to get more customers onboarded and will do whatever they can to help you.
- blaines 11y agoWho exactly at AWS were you asking? I talked to people at the AWS loft a few times and they said there was nothing they could do for our startup.