3 ms·
> It is nice to be able to put 4x more GPUs online in a few hours instead of a day, but I am not sure it commands a 33% premium except in very specific marginal
by mmt 8y ago
> It is nice to be able to put 4x more GPUs online in a few hours instead of a day, but I am not sure it commands a 33% premium except in very specific marginal cases.
I suspect that, in general, it commands an even higher price premium, as irrational as that may seem (or actually be).
This particular business is based off the notion of fixed budgets (and, presumably, short time limits), which means that, no matter how much cheaper over all it is to rent resources for a full month, it's worth the premium to rent as much as you can for a result in 10 days.
This reasonining can apply to an early startup, too (in terms of time-to-market and unpredictable scalability), but it becomes actually-irrational when it's not re-evaluated and a huge premium [1] is being paid for routine, easily-predictable infrastructure sourced from cloud providers.
[1] hundreds of percent, i.e. multiples
- 1996 8y agoIndeed, it seems to be a nice business niche: charge a large premium for on-demand services, just hoping that clients are actively irrational in not re-evaluating their needs. Basically, you are betting they are too lazy to be moving over to a better baseline offer. Better: you can encourage this lazyness with lock-in, like Amazon does!! That being said, cloud hosting is also funny in a different way: it reminds me of the late 90s, when you had to declare your hostname and use a ftp account to upload your files to your host.