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Ask HN: How to market large scale open source hosting?

8 points by telmich 9y ago

TL;DR How to market www.datacenterlight.ch non intrusively to Open Source hackers? Hello, here is Nico, FOSS hacker and CEO of ungleich.ch, a small Swiss Open Source company. We have the Swiss wide unique possibility to offer really affordable VM hosting in the midst of the mountains of Switzerland, because we can host our servers in old factory halls. Thus we save a lot of energy and money and want to give this price advantage to our customers. We love that our software stack is 100% open source, running with locally produced water power and omitting active cooling (because it is cold enough). That said, with our low margin want to address a substantial amount of customers and mainly those who love Open Source like we do. Running a browser with adblocker myself and hating unsolicited advertising, blinky gifs, etc. I wonder about your opinion: How do you think we should market our product?

boulos 9y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. You should probably redo this as a Show HN. In that spirit, some feedback on your landing page: - People have lots of reasons behind why they choose an infrastructure provider. Yours seems mostly "goodwill" (both from an environmental and OSS standpoint). Call that out in a "Why Datacenter Light?" Page or section. - You mention (both here and on the landing page) your open-source stack. Can you say more? Is it KVM based? Do you use Kubernetes? The HN crowd and your target audience (OSS people looking for a box in Switzerland) would appreciate it. A basic set of bullet points would go a long way (and/or a Git repo!). - Moreover an engineering blog on how you stood this up would likely get lots of interest from HN. How'd you find this factory? Why'd you choose whatever bits you did for a hypervisor? Enough of that content spreads around and you're suddenly looking at customers. - Most directly, you presumably think of yourself as an alternative to VPS providers and Digital Ocean in particular. I'll caution that DO has had to gain "real cloud provider" services like load balancing, object storage, remote block storage and so on. Which of those do you (plan to) offer? - While I don't think it's the most important thing you probably want a different name for this offering. Datacenter Light is fairly generic thing (and non-Swiss-German speakers won't know what your umbrella company name means, but you needn't change that). - Finally, sponsor small events that most directly fit your target audience. My assumption is that you are starting this in Switzerland not only because you live there but because you believe in the current security climate that other people want to host there. There are lots of great ways to spend $500 to host a beer gathering at an important conference and turn that into interest and word of mouth. Best of luck!
- telmich 9y ago
  Thanks a lot for your awesome suggestions boulos! It is much appreciated and I think our web team is already working on fixing some of the things you mentioned! I think you have many valid points and let me try to answer some of your questions: - Our Stack is based on Devuan, OpenNebula, Ceph, KVM, cdist, Django, Keepalived, radvd, nftables, bind and tayga... - ... which brings me to another point that I haven't mentioned: we are also 100% IPv6. No VM has IPv4 addresses, but our routers do stateless NAT64 so that VMs are still reachable by IPv4. - No Kubernetes yet, but containerisation is on our roadmap - Git repo: there are actually many! Most if not all on https://github.com/ungleich/ https://github.com/ungleich/ are directly used or at least related - We do actually have a blog at https://blog.ungleich.ch/en-us/blog/ https://blog.ungleich.ch/en-us/blog/ - mostly engineering, partly also content from our other project "Digital Glarus" (www.digitalglarus.ch) - How we found this factory hall? By bike. It's just pretty here and if you ask the right people, you literally get door openers! - Regarding additional services: load balancing is planned to be either provided with OpenNebula or custom (because we already have cdist types for it) - the challenge here is that our billing system is not that far developed at the moment - Object and block storage is also on the roadmap and we can probably provide it directly from Ceph - again the billing part is the current challenge at the moment - Name point taken - we are great in finding bad names (that's why we are called ungleich) - Small conferences: Sounds indeed like a good idea - we have been sponsoring the OpenNebula conference in Spain so far (because we use their software), but targeting Switzerland is indeed a better idea Thanks again for your great input, it helps us (me) a lot!
  - boulos 9y ago
    Cool! Seems like you have a lot of content you could write up. You should absolutely highlight the IPv6 bit. Find the time to make real-time metering and billing an integral part of your system; it's critical to a customer's experience and it gets to be super embarrassing that you can spin machines up and down quickly but can't tell someone how much they're spending (cough cough). I want to clarify the Switzerland thing: I meant sponsor beer or whatever at a security/crypto/privacy-focused event.
- telmich 9y ago