4 ms·

I'm curious how Linode and Slicehost will respond. This is pretty hard to beat.

by tibbon 16y ago

tyrelb 16y ago
Basically Linode competes on customer service and support!
- borism 16y ago
  that's futile in the commodity business
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    Is it? This isn't coal and steel we are talking about.
    - apl 16y ago
      It will be in the long run.
- sedachv 16y ago
  If by customer service and support, you mean reliability, then I agree with you. The whole point of buying hosting is it should just stay up. Prompt customer support isn't worth very much when you have to use it to find out why your server went down.
lsc 16y ago
this is my thought/fear too, as I'm in the same space. Now, I tried 'free' before and I just about lost my shirt. I got a bunch of jerks signing up with fake names and then running up my bandwidth bills with torrents, then at the end of the month, nobody, ah, "converted" so I am not going to respond with 'free' One of my responses could be to push my larger domains (which are quite a bit cheaper than the competition) or continue focusing on the international market. (I haven't read the fine print of the amazon offer, but I'll eat my hat if they give free accounts to, say, Brazilians.) So yeah; my current attitude is "wait and see" - as of today I'm still selling out servers as fast as I can put them up... if that changes, I'll change something. As for slicehost/linode, my personal guess is that they will both tout their substantial customer support advantages over amazon.
- mahmud 16y ago
  If you make your services any cheaper, I will personally unsubscribe, since I will no longer think you're in it to make a living, but offering a charity. http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ You really have everyone beat on price, by a mile. Too bad, there aren't enough cheap, unix-gurus to make use of it :-) People these days want an ajax console with drop-down menus for shell commands.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    I just signed up... I've been looking at the prgmr signup page off and on for six months and it's usually backlogged. Glad to finally get in! I have a month-old AWS account with about $0.30 in lifetime charges on it. I never quite felt like I knew how much of a bill I was racking up when it was turned on.
    - dpritchett 16y ago
      ...and I just noticed that I can get twice as much for $6 as I do for $5. Whoops. Hopefully I can put in an upgrade request sometime after I get provisioned. Maybe clojure can run in 64mb? I'm skeptical but we'll see.
      - mahmud 16y ago
        Go to the IRC channel NOW! :-) God! I love companies with IRC chans.
  - lsc 16y ago
    hah. well, I am making a living off of it. the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling with Moore's law, right? Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the bottleneck is pretty solidly me. Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double in the next 6 months, which
dotBen 16y ago
I would hope that Linode doesn't do anything price-wise otherwise it is entering into race the bottom (I'm a L customer, don't care as much what SH do). For me, the AWS free account is to more about letting developers play around with the unique features(/challenges) of AWS before needing to actually deploy a real product. There are a lot of unique things to consider with AWS that you don't have to deal with on regular VPSs. This isn't about creating a free tier of hosting, and if Linode did offer something like this I'd be concerned about the potential impact on the hypervisor machine load and additional support impact.

I'm curious how Linode and Slicehost will respond. This is pretty hard to beat.

by tibbon 16y ago

I'm curious how Linode and Slicehost will respond. This is pretty hard to beat.

tyrelb 16y ago

Basically Linode competes on customer service and support!

borism 16y ago
that's futile in the commodity business
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Is it? This isn't coal and steel we are talking about.
  - apl 16y ago
    It will be in the long run.
sedachv 16y ago
If by customer service and support, you mean reliability, then I agree with you. The whole point of buying hosting is it should just stay up. Prompt customer support isn't worth very much when you have to use it to find out why your server went down.

lsc 16y ago

this is my thought/fear too, as I'm in the same space. Now, I tried 'free' before and I just about lost my shirt. I got a bunch of jerks signing up with fake names and then running up my bandwidth bills with torrents, then at the end of the month, nobody, ah, "converted" so I am not going to respond with 'free' One of my responses could be to push my larger domains (which are quite a bit cheaper than the competition) or continue focusing on the international market. (I haven't read the fine print of the amazon offer, but I'll eat my hat if they give free accounts to, say, Brazilians.) So yeah; my current attitude is "wait and see" - as of today I'm still selling out servers as fast as I can put them up... if that changes, I'll change something. As for slicehost/linode, my personal guess is that they will both tout their substantial customer support advantages over amazon.

mahmud 16y ago
If you make your services any cheaper, I will personally unsubscribe, since I will no longer think you're in it to make a living, but offering a charity. http://prgmr.com/xen/ http://prgmr.com/xen/ You really have everyone beat on price, by a mile. Too bad, there aren't enough cheap, unix-gurus to make use of it :-) People these days want an ajax console with drop-down menus for shell commands.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  I just signed up... I've been looking at the prgmr signup page off and on for six months and it's usually backlogged. Glad to finally get in! I have a month-old AWS account with about $0.30 in lifetime charges on it. I never quite felt like I knew how much of a bill I was racking up when it was turned on.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    ...and I just noticed that I can get twice as much for $6 as I do for $5. Whoops. Hopefully I can put in an upgrade request sometime after I get provisioned. Maybe clojure can run in 64mb? I'm skeptical but we'll see.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      Go to the IRC channel NOW! :-) God! I love companies with IRC chans.
- lsc 16y ago
  hah. well, I am making a living off of it. the thing of it is, really, prices for this sort of thing should be falling with Moore's law, right? Also, there seems to be enough cheap UNIX people to keep me busy... I've been selling out hardware about as fast as I can put it up. at this point the bottleneck is pretty solidly me. Of course, I'm charging prices that would be pretty high margin if I was 'at scale' and, well, I'm not even close, at the moment, so I don't have as much wiggle room as I would have otherwise, but rest assured, it's profitable, at least when I don't screw it up. I've set a (I think realistic) goal to double in the next 6 months, which

dotBen 16y ago

I would hope that Linode doesn't do anything price-wise otherwise it is entering into race the bottom (I'm a L customer, don't care as much what SH do). For me, the AWS free account is to more about letting developers play around with the unique features(/challenges) of AWS before needing to actually deploy a real product. There are a lot of unique things to consider with AWS that you don't have to deal with on regular VPSs. This isn't about creating a free tier of hosting, and if Linode did offer something like this I'd be concerned about the potential impact on the hypervisor machine load and additional support impact.