I'm sorry but this was a bit of a painful read. Hindsight is 20/20 but this was pretty poor engineering and business modelling from the start. "To ensure there

I'm sorry but this was a bit of a painful read. Hindsight is 20/20 but this was pretty poor engineering and business modelling from the start. "To ensure there was no way for one user’s data to mingle with another, each cloud instance had its own dedicated VM, database, and a large number of security configurations to prevent any funny business.". AWS has a myriad of security and isolation tools to do that in significantly better and cost efficient ways. "Octopus Cloud customers could start a free 30-day trial, which meant that those hundreds of trial signups per month, each of which cost us $100 to host, quickly added up." So you're essentially allowing anyone to press a "Submit" button to spend $100 for you. This sort of below-cost methods to gain marketshare works for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and son because they have the deep pockets but it's a questionable strategy for smaller companies.