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2. Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace. No Azure? considering how much Microsoft gives away wi

2. Of the YC companies that use hosting providers, 55% use AWS, 13% use Cloudflare and 6% use Rackspace. No Azure? considering how much Microsoft gives away with their bizspark program, this is surprising.

jmspring 10y ago
I'd be curious why. If there are issues, happy to try and help out.
- MatthewMcDonald 10y ago
  We tried to use Azure for a new system ~8 months ago (it's hard to pass up that much money). Spinning up a vm with the image we needed and a static ip was not possible with the GUI. The specific image we needed was only accessible on the "new" portal, but a static IP could only be assigned from the "old" portal. It's theoretically possible to set it up with PowerShell, but after spending over a week of poring over outdated and incomplete documentation and opening support tickets, we switched to AWS and had it running in a few hours. Even if we did get it to work, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable investing in a platform where something as simple as "create a vm with this image and assign a static ip" isn't straightforward. It could be better now, but for us (and most other young startups) the time of our engineers is much more scarce than hosting costs.
wpietri 10y ago
Is that surprising? Early on, I wouldn't worry much about server cost. Salaries are usually the big budget item, and I'd lean toward boring/default choices for anything that isn't absolutely vital for demonstrating traction. Then if a startup hits the growth phase, I'd expect server costs are still relatively low priority.
sseveran 10y ago
AWS gives away a some as well. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
tedmiston 10y ago
Remember new YC cos get beaucoup Azure credit now. (I'm not sure how much they get on AWS.) It would be interesting to see if the offering has had an effect. > We are happy to announce the Microsoft will be giving $500,000 of free Azure hosting credit to YC startups in our Winter 2015 batch and future batches. https://blog.ycombinator.com/$500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-startups https://blog.ycombinator.com/$500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-st...

jmspring 10y ago

I'd be curious why. If there are issues, happy to try and help out.

MatthewMcDonald 10y ago
We tried to use Azure for a new system ~8 months ago (it's hard to pass up that much money). Spinning up a vm with the image we needed and a static ip was not possible with the GUI. The specific image we needed was only accessible on the "new" portal, but a static IP could only be assigned from the "old" portal. It's theoretically possible to set it up with PowerShell, but after spending over a week of poring over outdated and incomplete documentation and opening support tickets, we switched to AWS and had it running in a few hours. Even if we did get it to work, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable investing in a platform where something as simple as "create a vm with this image and assign a static ip" isn't straightforward. It could be better now, but for us (and most other young startups) the time of our engineers is much more scarce than hosting costs.

wpietri 10y ago

Is that surprising? Early on, I wouldn't worry much about server cost. Salaries are usually the big budget item, and I'd lean toward boring/default choices for anything that isn't absolutely vital for demonstrating traction. Then if a startup hits the growth phase, I'd expect server costs are still relatively low priority.

sseveran 10y ago

AWS gives away a some as well. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

tedmiston 10y ago

Remember new YC cos get beaucoup Azure credit now. (I'm not sure how much they get on AWS.) It would be interesting to see if the offering has had an effect. > We are happy to announce the Microsoft will be giving $500,000 of free Azure hosting credit to YC startups in our Winter 2015 batch and future batches. https://blog.ycombinator.com/$500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-startups https://blog.ycombinator.com/$500k-of-azure-credit-for-yc-st...