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DotCloud Pricing Announced

133 points by jreposa 15y ago

jreposa 15y ago
It's a bit vague on details, but I'm going to contact them regarding a 6+ setup once I get my code up and running.
- andymoe 15y ago
  From the pricing FAQ it looks like $99 for 4 instances is the minimum and then additional pro instances are 40 bucks each a month after that. https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ EDIT: Also, +1 for a password reset feature to fire up that beta account again.
phlux 15y ago
Wow, maybe I really dont understand how these things should be priced - but you effectively need to pay $99 a month if the only additional feature from FREE you want is to have a custom domain. Also WTF is "high availability" if it is NOT available to free/$99 customers? Rather, what is NOT HA to those users. Personally - I think you need a custom domain addon to the free that is affordable to individuals. EDIT: Maybe calling it HA for the enterprise customers is poor wording. I think if you state "SLA" to enterprise - that is language they understand and it doesnt make it look like you're implying that other users have no HA options. It makes it sound like your advertising a single-point-of-failure architecture directly.
- ryanhuff 15y ago
  I agree, although perhaps have the custom domain thing be a smaller add-on option. I can see myself wanting to start with a custom domain for a yet-unproven product, but not paying $99. That's a huge leap from other, less expensive options. I bet a lot of potential customers if pass on them unless they fill the void/need for custom domains at a lower price point. Maybe have a $10/month custom domain option on top of the free offering?
- rdl 15y ago
  I think by HA they mean failover, vs. compensation (SLA).
  - phlux 15y ago
    I think the average HN user gets HA means failover - but most users just take that to mean that the free service is likely to fail. Its about the wording, it should be less WTF-inducing.
    - shykes 15y ago
      Point taken - we'll work on making this more clear.
- tptacek 15y ago
  "Custom domain" is an obvious customer segmentation knob. Why should they sacrifice it? How serious about hosting an app is someone who expects to pay less than, say, $1000 a year to host it? It costs money to support customers, and, as many people have noticed before, the customers who pay less often cost more to support. Strongly recommend not adding a cheap-o option for people to get just custom domains. Don't kid yourself. Either people are going to find the service valuable enough to pay for, or your business isn't going to be sustainable. You don't make it more sustainable by taking pennies from (likely) pathological customers.
  - ryanhuff 15y ago
    Sorry, but for somebody testing a new product in the market, $100 a month is just too much for such a trivial feature (the custom domain). Heroku charge $5/month for custom domains. Its all about the positioning, but this pricing tells me they aren't interested in the emerging, bootstrapped companies, which there are a ton.
    - shykes 15y ago
      Hi Ryan, we think at $99/month the pro account is great value for a small business. You get unlimited custom domains, ssl, scaling and premium support. And if you really can't afford it, get in touch about your project, we'll probably give it to you for free anyway.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Friendly advice: get better at saying "no".
        shykes 15y ago
        Thanks - we call HN the "no-no zone" :) The rest of the World is different.
        tptacek 15y ago
- shykes 15y ago
  Co-founder here. Sorry if the wording confuses you. Here's what we mean by HA: everything you deploy is natively spread out across multiple datacenters. That includes your frontend, workers and database. This is non-trivial stuff. Not to be confused with the usual bells and whistles of every PaaS under the sun, which we also offer - in all plans. Yes, we have a "mesh" which performs health checks on all your deployments, routes around network failures, re-deploys automatically on hardware failure, etc.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Add a line-item over "HA" that every account has that brands the "bells and whistles every PaaS under the sun has", then write the "HA" feature to contrast with it.
    - Periodic 15y ago
      The current wording is causing us to focus on what the lower tier lack, and doesn't highlight what they have. For example, does it automatically load balance? Is there redundancy within the data center? For example, is a PHP+MySQL free plan equivalent to one $20 linode, or is it replicated databases and load balanced web servers across five systems?
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Right, so they need a line for "best-in-class industry standard reliability measures like X Y and Z" that all accounts have, and then below it the extra bell and whistle that you can buy for "Enterprise" accounts.
mikexstudios 15y ago
There's a very big pricing gap between the free and pro ($99/month) service. This may be difficult for smaller startups. However, there are "free services for open source hackers, students, startups and non-profits" if you contact them. See the Pricing FAQ page: https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/
- tathagatadg 15y ago
  If they are really generous towards students and make this sexy stacks available available at lower price, it will mean a world to us. Course/research projects are done in such short time that we sacrifice kick ass features in order to do away with the mess of setting up these services. Can't imagine the possibilities a inter-school competition with such a stack ...
  - shykes 15y ago
    You should really get in touch with us :)
vyrotek 15y ago
Stack Choice - Any Stack ANY stack? How about .Net? :)
- shykes 15y ago
  It's on the way :)
  - vyrotek 15y ago
    Consider me intrigued! We're currently running on Azure. I'm very interested to see how you'll compare to them and AppHarbor.
- benologist 15y ago
  http://appharbor.com http://appharbor.com are pretty awesome for .NET.
dstein 15y ago
I'm glad to see free-tiers becoming commonplace. There's enough barrier to entry for people to learn these new cloud platforms as it is. And once you're hooked, you're hooked.
nicksergeant 15y ago
Glad I didn't invest too much time in playing around with DotCloud. I can certainly see the justified expense when an organization is footing the bill, but for powering freelance projects, it's not entirely reasonable.
- Periodic 15y ago
  I think they're not targeting freelancers as much as larger companies. They're looking for a more "serious" crowd that also doesn't do systems administration. They offer a little more simplicity than managing full VPS solutions, but that costs more up front.
  - nicksergeant 15y ago
    I get that, but the more "serious" crowd usually does do sysadmin. Freelancers can be deceivingly profitable, IMO. I have 10+ sites that I'd easily pay the $99/mo to host if they gave me unlimited sites at that price point.
ApolloRising 15y ago
Lack of custom domains on the Free is really unfortunate. People like to see their sites live on a real domain before investing the 1200 a year in hosting. I think you need to put a smaller tier 25, 50, 100 and then ramp up from there if you want to get some of the early startup market.
- vladd 15y ago
  At our startup (kind of a dotcloud specialized for server-side JavaScript) we offer custom domains support [1] starting at $29.95/month, but in general we found out that people take out the time to try the product and the user experience on the free plan before putting any real money into the service. Maybe it's a behaviour specific for this audience (early adopters in this market are more likely to be individual or startup programmers rather than typical hosting clients, and the technology is relatively new which makes the value proposition to be hard to grasp without a hands-on experience). [1] https://secure.erbix.com/pricing https://secure.erbix.com/pricing
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    Eh, people always want the things they want for free. "It's a pity the free tier doesn't include the thing I want most, if it did I might pay for it down the line". They rarely do.
ethank 15y ago
Hate to be a buzz kill but: My site was down for 5 hours on Dotcloud yesterday because of a wildcard alias issue (effectively my cname stopped working). I e-mailed support and heard nothing until I tweeted referencing their twitter handle, then got a response asking that I file an email ticket. In the meantime, the site came back. This is just a fun toy site, so not a real business, but still. Dotcloud has been easy to use and deployments are nice and easy, but I can't justify spending money on a company who really really needs to invest on a support infrastructure.
- shykes 15y ago
  Ethan, 2 things: 1) This was completely unacceptable on our part. I lose my temper maybe once a year, and yesterday I did precisely because of your ordeal. 2) Ironically, this happened precisely because we are investing heavily in our support infrastructure. As we transition from one overloaded senior engineer to a full-time support team + every engineer in the company in rotations, these kinds of quirks are bound to happen until we iron out the new process. In short: - we're incredibly sorry. - we care enormously about support. - and what happened to you is very rare.
  - true_religion 15y ago
    Apologies are good and all, but this is why you need and SLA with compensation. No one wants to lose money, then have the culprit say "oops, its growing pains again".
shykes 15y ago
Hi all, DotCloud co-founder here. Happy to answer questions as usual. 2 important notes: 1) all private beta users are getting a VIP paid account *for free*. Details soon. 2) Hackers and startups will also get free stuff. *lots* of it. If you like DotCloud but think you can't afford it - get in touch. We'd rather build high-quality stuff, priced fairly, and give some of it away, than race to the bottom along with everybody else.
- dongsheng 15y ago
  Woo, thanks for the candy :-)
- ondrae 15y ago
  Thanks Shykes! I've been building my app on your service and have become hooked. I showed your tour video to my office today and they were all very intrigued. Congratulations on the launch.
- singlow 15y ago
  Three quick things: Password reset form? Created an account but it won't let me log in. Maybe a messed up the password cut and paste from my password database. Second, no ssl for the login form? Is this coming soon? Third, I occasionally would get redirected to a subdomain http://c959ac0b.dotcloud.com http://c959ac0b.dotcloud.com which doesn't seem to have the same session cookie as the www domain.
  - andybak 15y ago
    Same here. Accepted a beta invite a while back. Now I can't login.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  $102.40 per GB-month of RAM is crazy. Compare to $21 per GB-month for on-demand or $14 per GB-month for reserved (annual) on EC2.
  - ericd 15y ago
abronte 15y ago
Why is there no "forgot my password" form?
- MichaelReed 15y ago
  Completely unrelated to dotcloud, but HN has no "forgot my password" function that I could ever find when I needed it. On that I'll agree that having one is super useful.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
I clicked the "About" link in the header and got a page of press releases and news clips. Bad form.
- gabrielgrant 15y ago
  Not anymore -- check it again: http://www.dotcloud.com/about/ http://www.dotcloud.com/about/
  - RyanMcGreal 15y ago
    Much better. Even better still would be a short written description that I can quickly scan and parse without having to watch a video. :)
    - loevborg 15y ago
      That's definitely true. Like many I'm at a workplace where I can't turn on sound. In fact, I don't even have a working sound card in this computer. Videos are nice and all, but they should always be optional.
lost-theory 15y ago
One thing that seems to be missing: how many different apps can you deploy under each level? Do you count the services per-app? If I want to deploy 10 separate python apps, would I have to use the enterprise level?
- shykes 15y ago
  Your services can be spread out across as many apps as you want. If you need more than 4 services, you can simply purchase more - no need to upgrade to enterprise.
jcborro 15y ago
$1 per MB per month for DB memory after 300. So if you wanted an 8GB db, you are looking at $7700/month. Ouch.
- thesis 15y ago
  That's one heck of a markup.
  - shykes 15y ago
    Actually, it's one heck of a typo :) Our real price is $1/10MB. Sorry about that.
    - thesis 15y ago
      I wish you the best of luck with that price point... but in my opinion it's still way to high.
moe 15y ago
Sorry, I find your pricing rather confusing. A service represents a given application or database, such as PHP, Ruby or MySQL. For example, if your plan includes 2 services, you can run an instance of Python and an instance of MySQL. If you wanted to use an additional runtime, such as PHP, you would need an additional service. Okay, so I pay $99 for 4 of these "services". Does a service equate to one UNIX process of my application running in a sandbox on one of your servers? How are resources allocated on the (presumably) shared host? How much RAM does my service get? And then there's this, which I hope is a typo: Database services scale differently [...] With the Pro plan, database services have 10 GB of disk, and 300 MB of RAM. [...] Additional database capacity can be added to the Pro or Enterprise plans, at $1 / MB of RAM / month, and $1 / GB of disk / month. One second. 300MB Ram for a database? And upgrading to a still microscopic 1GB of Ram will cost me $700/mo? And 1TB of disk will cost me $1000/mo? Seriously?
- shykes 15y ago
  Yes, ram cost is in fact a typo - actual price is 10x lower. Sorry about that. When you push your application to dotCloud, it's broken down into services. For example python frontend, nodejs worker, mysql: that's 3 services. Each service starts with a certain amount of capacity. Those are soft limits: you get a guaranteed minimum, but you'll probably get more, most of the time. It's most definitely not like shared hosting in that regard. Each service can then be scaled individually, by allocating more concurrent processes, ram or disk. Specific costs are listed in the FAQ. Hope that helps.
Hipchan 15y ago
Is websocket support for node.js coming any time soon? There are already solutions for nginx/websockets on github.
mythz 15y ago
Right $100 is hideously expensive for a starting price, I guess it was a good business model to announce pricing after generating word of mouth.
alvivar 15y ago
I would recommend something between Free and Pro, If I were about to launch a startup I won't pay $100 a month at the beginning. A programming language, a database and a custom domain are the basics, this "combo" needs to be an option. With the free account we could test the platform and develop, with the "startup account" we can launch our product, with a little success we take an upgrade to pro for cache, etc.
- matthewphiong 15y ago
  Or how about a free, startup friendly plan and in return get free marketing from the startup, a link back at the footer (powered by DotCloud).
  - shykes 15y ago
    That's exactly what we do :) Get in touch if you're interested.
  - alvivar 15y ago
    That's a good idea!
- troethom 15y ago
  Who should bear the risk for your startup - DotCloud or yourself? If you're creating a product you believe in, $100 (or more for that matter) should by no mean be out of reach - no matter if you're bootstrapping or looking to raise funding. In case you compare it to a cheap VPS, well, you get what you pay for - and you'll need to do the ops yourself, which is time you should rather spend building your business.
  - alvivar 15y ago
    I am just saying that a lot of people are searching for a platform where we can deploy for what we need. DotCloud let's me choose the stack I need, that's really good, but it would be awesome if also there is a plan with the price and features that I need. Flexibility. There is a big leap between free and pro, it's like take it or just play with it. I'm not suggesting a "better free", just an intermediate plan.
jacobian 15y ago
The huge jump from $0/mo to $100/mo makes this a non-starter for me, and I suspect I'm not the only one. I think these pricing points are a mistake; as someone very interested in this market it'll be interested to see if I'm right or not. I'll try to explain: I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and build isn't proven yet. But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned hard to argument with free! But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump right to $100/mo. I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or lifestyle businesses away. So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left? My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go the way of the dodo. [Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page. Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.] PS: Oh yeah, one other thing: Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone who doesn't get that.
- ethank 15y ago
  They should have a "hackday" tier.
- shykes 15y ago
  Jacob, before responding to your pricing comments let me start with SSL: we are in fact the most SSL-friendly PaaS out there: 1) Every URL on the platform gets piggyback ssl by default - no add-on necessary. That includes the free tier. 2) A pro account gets you unlimited SSL on your domain, regardless of how many apps you run. Nobody else does that. We'll make that clearer in the pricing page.
prayag 15y ago
I have been a happy dotcloud beta user for a month. As a founder of a small start-up outsourcing the entire sysadmin work is a great advantage and .the support on the IRC has been very valuable. The pricing seems a little steep but I would think that the time saved on doing sysadmin is a great value and would be decent trade-off for most start-ups. Though I do wish that they would beef up their support staff so that the issues are resolved faster than they are now.
- prayag 15y ago
  Forgot to mention that Solomon and Jerome are extremely knowledgeable engineers and very helpful. They hang out at freenode IRC at #dotcloud.
calloc 15y ago
Wow, this pricing is actually more expensive than I had hoped for. While the one app I am running at the moment requires just two services, but it does use a custom domain, and $99 a month for something that doesn't make me money (yet, hopefully). I love the idea of Dotcloud, and really do want to continue using it, but would love for them to introduce a tier between free and the $99. I am by no means suggesting that everything should be available for free, I am more than willing to pay my fair share.
fduran 15y ago
Hello, this looks great. A couple of comments: - first time I went to the site I got a nginx 404 message. - In the browser (Chrome for example) the https in the address bar is shown as "insecure" because it has non-https components, looks like changing the http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js call to https will fix this. - The "See the Full List >" link on the front page doesn't take me to a list of supported components but the "Platform Overview" page in the documentation.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
Private Beta user here. I'll just preface this by saying that DotCloud has been the smoothest and easiest service I've used in the Heroku-umbrella of products. That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant an account this big). On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of) from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well. They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single site total. TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest possible tier.
- stephth 15y ago
  they scale nicely auto-magically What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each: The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new service has one service process associated with it; additional service processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan, additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional service processes are priced at $40 / month. [1] http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/
beck5 15y ago
Im getting the feeling DotCloud wants to sit between somewhere in between Heroku and AWS. A little comparison table of cost & features would be interesting to se.
pclark 15y ago
I think people are confused by this pricing because you get so much on the free package.
pbreit 15y ago
It would be cool to see some set of Fabric or other scripts come together which offer some of the capabilities DotCloud is providing but that you can use on your own infrastructure or host.
tzury 15y ago
To Guys@DotCloud, Make sure you remove the last dot "." on the api-key. as copy/paste yield to "error: Authorization rejected" and one shall go and manually edit ~/.dotcloud/dotcloud.conf in order to get back in business
silverlight 15y ago
I have to say, I'm not sure what the benefit of this service is. I understand where you're trying to positon yourselves (a "Heroku for eveything"), but to me that just doesn't work. If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure, I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none. If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services, and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku + RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be comfortable just running things myself on AWS. About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo, etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just using bare-metal AWS, either. I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service providers for a "jack of all trades". EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP, Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby, Redis, CloudDB, others).
llazzaro 15y ago
I cant login to my dotcloud account. I am the only one?
vivekn 15y ago
I was kind of impressed with dotcloud beta, its really simple to mix and match databases and deploy them. But I guess I can't afford $100/mo for hosting my kind of experimental apps. I was expecting a usage based pricing scheme similar to Amazon or ep.io. You guys really need to have some intermediate plans. Its a great product, by the way!

133 points by jreposa 15y ago

jreposa 15y ago

It's a bit vague on details, but I'm going to contact them regarding a 6+ setup once I get my code up and running.

andymoe 15y ago
From the pricing FAQ it looks like $99 for 4 instances is the minimum and then additional pro instances are 40 bucks each a month after that. https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ EDIT: Also, +1 for a password reset feature to fire up that beta account again.

phlux 15y ago

Wow, maybe I really dont understand how these things should be priced - but you effectively need to pay $99 a month if the only additional feature from FREE you want is to have a custom domain. Also WTF is "high availability" if it is NOT available to free/$99 customers? Rather, what is NOT HA to those users. Personally - I think you need a custom domain addon to the free that is affordable to individuals. EDIT: Maybe calling it HA for the enterprise customers is poor wording. I think if you state "SLA" to enterprise - that is language they understand and it doesnt make it look like you're implying that other users have no HA options. It makes it sound like your advertising a single-point-of-failure architecture directly.

ryanhuff 15y ago
I agree, although perhaps have the custom domain thing be a smaller add-on option. I can see myself wanting to start with a custom domain for a yet-unproven product, but not paying $99. That's a huge leap from other, less expensive options. I bet a lot of potential customers if pass on them unless they fill the void/need for custom domains at a lower price point. Maybe have a $10/month custom domain option on top of the free offering?
rdl 15y ago
I think by HA they mean failover, vs. compensation (SLA).
- phlux 15y ago
  I think the average HN user gets HA means failover - but most users just take that to mean that the free service is likely to fail. Its about the wording, it should be less WTF-inducing.
  - shykes 15y ago
    Point taken - we'll work on making this more clear.
tptacek 15y ago
"Custom domain" is an obvious customer segmentation knob. Why should they sacrifice it? How serious about hosting an app is someone who expects to pay less than, say, $1000 a year to host it? It costs money to support customers, and, as many people have noticed before, the customers who pay less often cost more to support. Strongly recommend not adding a cheap-o option for people to get just custom domains. Don't kid yourself. Either people are going to find the service valuable enough to pay for, or your business isn't going to be sustainable. You don't make it more sustainable by taking pennies from (likely) pathological customers.
- ryanhuff 15y ago
  Sorry, but for somebody testing a new product in the market, $100 a month is just too much for such a trivial feature (the custom domain). Heroku charge $5/month for custom domains. Its all about the positioning, but this pricing tells me they aren't interested in the emerging, bootstrapped companies, which there are a ton.
  - shykes 15y ago
    Hi Ryan, we think at $99/month the pro account is great value for a small business. You get unlimited custom domains, ssl, scaling and premium support. And if you really can't afford it, get in touch about your project, we'll probably give it to you for free anyway.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Friendly advice: get better at saying "no".
      - shykes 15y ago
        Thanks - we call HN the "no-no zone" :) The rest of the World is different.
        tptacek 15y ago
shykes 15y ago
Co-founder here. Sorry if the wording confuses you. Here's what we mean by HA: everything you deploy is natively spread out across multiple datacenters. That includes your frontend, workers and database. This is non-trivial stuff. Not to be confused with the usual bells and whistles of every PaaS under the sun, which we also offer - in all plans. Yes, we have a "mesh" which performs health checks on all your deployments, routes around network failures, re-deploys automatically on hardware failure, etc.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Add a line-item over "HA" that every account has that brands the "bells and whistles every PaaS under the sun has", then write the "HA" feature to contrast with it.
  - Periodic 15y ago
    The current wording is causing us to focus on what the lower tier lack, and doesn't highlight what they have. For example, does it automatically load balance? Is there redundancy within the data center? For example, is a PHP+MySQL free plan equivalent to one $20 linode, or is it replicated databases and load balanced web servers across five systems?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Right, so they need a line for "best-in-class industry standard reliability measures like X Y and Z" that all accounts have, and then below it the extra bell and whistle that you can buy for "Enterprise" accounts.

mikexstudios 15y ago

There's a very big pricing gap between the free and pro ($99/month) service. This may be difficult for smaller startups. However, there are "free services for open source hackers, students, startups and non-profits" if you contact them. See the Pricing FAQ page: https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/

tathagatadg 15y ago
If they are really generous towards students and make this sexy stacks available available at lower price, it will mean a world to us. Course/research projects are done in such short time that we sacrifice kick ass features in order to do away with the mess of setting up these services. Can't imagine the possibilities a inter-school competition with such a stack ...
- shykes 15y ago
  You should really get in touch with us :)

vyrotek 15y ago

Stack Choice - Any Stack ANY stack? How about .Net? :)

shykes 15y ago
It's on the way :)
- vyrotek 15y ago
  Consider me intrigued! We're currently running on Azure. I'm very interested to see how you'll compare to them and AppHarbor.
benologist 15y ago
http://appharbor.com http://appharbor.com are pretty awesome for .NET.

dstein 15y ago

I'm glad to see free-tiers becoming commonplace. There's enough barrier to entry for people to learn these new cloud platforms as it is. And once you're hooked, you're hooked.

nicksergeant 15y ago

Glad I didn't invest too much time in playing around with DotCloud. I can certainly see the justified expense when an organization is footing the bill, but for powering freelance projects, it's not entirely reasonable.

Periodic 15y ago
I think they're not targeting freelancers as much as larger companies. They're looking for a more "serious" crowd that also doesn't do systems administration. They offer a little more simplicity than managing full VPS solutions, but that costs more up front.
- nicksergeant 15y ago
  I get that, but the more "serious" crowd usually does do sysadmin. Freelancers can be deceivingly profitable, IMO. I have 10+ sites that I'd easily pay the $99/mo to host if they gave me unlimited sites at that price point.

ApolloRising 15y ago

Lack of custom domains on the Free is really unfortunate. People like to see their sites live on a real domain before investing the 1200 a year in hosting. I think you need to put a smaller tier 25, 50, 100 and then ramp up from there if you want to get some of the early startup market.

vladd 15y ago
At our startup (kind of a dotcloud specialized for server-side JavaScript) we offer custom domains support [1] starting at $29.95/month, but in general we found out that people take out the time to try the product and the user experience on the free plan before putting any real money into the service. Maybe it's a behaviour specific for this audience (early adopters in this market are more likely to be individual or startup programmers rather than typical hosting clients, and the technology is relatively new which makes the value proposition to be hard to grasp without a hands-on experience). [1] https://secure.erbix.com/pricing https://secure.erbix.com/pricing
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Eh, people always want the things they want for free. "It's a pity the free tier doesn't include the thing I want most, if it did I might pay for it down the line". They rarely do.

ethank 15y ago

Hate to be a buzz kill but: My site was down for 5 hours on Dotcloud yesterday because of a wildcard alias issue (effectively my cname stopped working). I e-mailed support and heard nothing until I tweeted referencing their twitter handle, then got a response asking that I file an email ticket. In the meantime, the site came back. This is just a fun toy site, so not a real business, but still. Dotcloud has been easy to use and deployments are nice and easy, but I can't justify spending money on a company who really really needs to invest on a support infrastructure.

shykes 15y ago
Ethan, 2 things: 1) This was completely unacceptable on our part. I lose my temper maybe once a year, and yesterday I did precisely because of your ordeal. 2) Ironically, this happened precisely because we are investing heavily in our support infrastructure. As we transition from one overloaded senior engineer to a full-time support team + every engineer in the company in rotations, these kinds of quirks are bound to happen until we iron out the new process. In short: - we're incredibly sorry. - we care enormously about support. - and what happened to you is very rare.
- true_religion 15y ago
  Apologies are good and all, but this is why you need and SLA with compensation. No one wants to lose money, then have the culprit say "oops, its growing pains again".

shykes 15y ago

Hi all, DotCloud co-founder here. Happy to answer questions as usual. 2 important notes: 1) all private beta users are getting a VIP paid account *for free*. Details soon. 2) Hackers and startups will also get free stuff. *lots* of it. If you like DotCloud but think you can't afford it - get in touch. We'd rather build high-quality stuff, priced fairly, and give some of it away, than race to the bottom along with everybody else.

dongsheng 15y ago
Woo, thanks for the candy :-)
ondrae 15y ago
Thanks Shykes! I've been building my app on your service and have become hooked. I showed your tour video to my office today and they were all very intrigued. Congratulations on the launch.
singlow 15y ago
Three quick things: Password reset form? Created an account but it won't let me log in. Maybe a messed up the password cut and paste from my password database. Second, no ssl for the login form? Is this coming soon? Third, I occasionally would get redirected to a subdomain http://c959ac0b.dotcloud.com http://c959ac0b.dotcloud.com which doesn't seem to have the same session cookie as the www domain.
- andybak 15y ago
  Same here. Accepted a beta invite a while back. Now I can't login.
aaronblohowiak 15y ago
$102.40 per GB-month of RAM is crazy. Compare to $21 per GB-month for on-demand or $14 per GB-month for reserved (annual) on EC2.
- ericd 15y ago

abronte 15y ago

Why is there no "forgot my password" form?

MichaelReed 15y ago
Completely unrelated to dotcloud, but HN has no "forgot my password" function that I could ever find when I needed it. On that I'll agree that having one is super useful.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

I clicked the "About" link in the header and got a page of press releases and news clips. Bad form.

gabrielgrant 15y ago
Not anymore -- check it again: http://www.dotcloud.com/about/ http://www.dotcloud.com/about/
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Much better. Even better still would be a short written description that I can quickly scan and parse without having to watch a video. :)
  - loevborg 15y ago
    That's definitely true. Like many I'm at a workplace where I can't turn on sound. In fact, I don't even have a working sound card in this computer. Videos are nice and all, but they should always be optional.

lost-theory 15y ago

One thing that seems to be missing: how many different apps can you deploy under each level? Do you count the services per-app? If I want to deploy 10 separate python apps, would I have to use the enterprise level?

shykes 15y ago
Your services can be spread out across as many apps as you want. If you need more than 4 services, you can simply purchase more - no need to upgrade to enterprise.

jcborro 15y ago

$1 per MB per month for DB memory after 300. So if you wanted an 8GB db, you are looking at $7700/month. Ouch.

thesis 15y ago
That's one heck of a markup.
- shykes 15y ago
  Actually, it's one heck of a typo :) Our real price is $1/10MB. Sorry about that.
  - thesis 15y ago
    I wish you the best of luck with that price point... but in my opinion it's still way to high.

moe 15y ago

Sorry, I find your pricing rather confusing. A service represents a given application or database, such as PHP, Ruby or MySQL. For example, if your plan includes 2 services, you can run an instance of Python and an instance of MySQL. If you wanted to use an additional runtime, such as PHP, you would need an additional service. Okay, so I pay $99 for 4 of these "services". Does a service equate to one UNIX process of my application running in a sandbox on one of your servers? How are resources allocated on the (presumably) shared host? How much RAM does my service get? And then there's this, which I hope is a typo: Database services scale differently [...] With the Pro plan, database services have 10 GB of disk, and 300 MB of RAM. [...] Additional database capacity can be added to the Pro or Enterprise plans, at $1 / MB of RAM / month, and $1 / GB of disk / month. One second. 300MB Ram for a database? And upgrading to a still microscopic 1GB of Ram will cost me $700/mo? And 1TB of disk will cost me $1000/mo? Seriously?

shykes 15y ago
Yes, ram cost is in fact a typo - actual price is 10x lower. Sorry about that. When you push your application to dotCloud, it's broken down into services. For example python frontend, nodejs worker, mysql: that's 3 services. Each service starts with a certain amount of capacity. Those are soft limits: you get a guaranteed minimum, but you'll probably get more, most of the time. It's most definitely not like shared hosting in that regard. Each service can then be scaled individually, by allocating more concurrent processes, ram or disk. Specific costs are listed in the FAQ. Hope that helps.

Hipchan 15y ago

Is websocket support for node.js coming any time soon? There are already solutions for nginx/websockets on github.

mythz 15y ago

Right $100 is hideously expensive for a starting price, I guess it was a good business model to announce pricing after generating word of mouth.

alvivar 15y ago

I would recommend something between Free and Pro, If I were about to launch a startup I won't pay $100 a month at the beginning. A programming language, a database and a custom domain are the basics, this "combo" needs to be an option. With the free account we could test the platform and develop, with the "startup account" we can launch our product, with a little success we take an upgrade to pro for cache, etc.

matthewphiong 15y ago
Or how about a free, startup friendly plan and in return get free marketing from the startup, a link back at the footer (powered by DotCloud).
- shykes 15y ago
  That's exactly what we do :) Get in touch if you're interested.
- alvivar 15y ago
  That's a good idea!
troethom 15y ago
Who should bear the risk for your startup - DotCloud or yourself? If you're creating a product you believe in, $100 (or more for that matter) should by no mean be out of reach - no matter if you're bootstrapping or looking to raise funding. In case you compare it to a cheap VPS, well, you get what you pay for - and you'll need to do the ops yourself, which is time you should rather spend building your business.
- alvivar 15y ago
  I am just saying that a lot of people are searching for a platform where we can deploy for what we need. DotCloud let's me choose the stack I need, that's really good, but it would be awesome if also there is a plan with the price and features that I need. Flexibility. There is a big leap between free and pro, it's like take it or just play with it. I'm not suggesting a "better free", just an intermediate plan.

jacobian 15y ago

The huge jump from $0/mo to $100/mo makes this a non-starter for me, and I suspect I'm not the only one. I think these pricing points are a mistake; as someone very interested in this market it'll be interested to see if I'm right or not. I'll try to explain: I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and build isn't proven yet. But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned hard to argument with free! But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump right to $100/mo. I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or lifestyle businesses away. So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left? My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go the way of the dodo. [Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page. Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.] PS: Oh yeah, one other thing: Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone who doesn't get that.

ethank 15y ago
They should have a "hackday" tier.
shykes 15y ago
Jacob, before responding to your pricing comments let me start with SSL: we are in fact the most SSL-friendly PaaS out there: 1) Every URL on the platform gets piggyback ssl by default - no add-on necessary. That includes the free tier. 2) A pro account gets you unlimited SSL on your domain, regardless of how many apps you run. Nobody else does that. We'll make that clearer in the pricing page.

prayag 15y ago

I have been a happy dotcloud beta user for a month. As a founder of a small start-up outsourcing the entire sysadmin work is a great advantage and .the support on the IRC has been very valuable. The pricing seems a little steep but I would think that the time saved on doing sysadmin is a great value and would be decent trade-off for most start-ups. Though I do wish that they would beef up their support staff so that the issues are resolved faster than they are now.

prayag 15y ago
Forgot to mention that Solomon and Jerome are extremely knowledgeable engineers and very helpful. They hang out at freenode IRC at #dotcloud.

calloc 15y ago

Wow, this pricing is actually more expensive than I had hoped for. While the one app I am running at the moment requires just two services, but it does use a custom domain, and $99 a month for something that doesn't make me money (yet, hopefully). I love the idea of Dotcloud, and really do want to continue using it, but would love for them to introduce a tier between free and the $99. I am by no means suggesting that everything should be available for free, I am more than willing to pay my fair share.

fduran 15y ago

Hello, this looks great. A couple of comments: - first time I went to the site I got a nginx 404 message. - In the browser (Chrome for example) the https in the address bar is shown as "insecure" because it has non-https components, looks like changing the http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js call to https will fix this. - The "See the Full List >" link on the front page doesn't take me to a list of supported components but the "Platform Overview" page in the documentation.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago

Private Beta user here. I'll just preface this by saying that DotCloud has been the smoothest and easiest service I've used in the Heroku-umbrella of products. That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant an account this big). On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of) from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well. They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single site total. TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest possible tier.

stephth 15y ago
they scale nicely auto-magically What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each: The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new service has one service process associated with it; additional service processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan, additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional service processes are priced at $40 / month. [1] http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/ http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/

beck5 15y ago

Im getting the feeling DotCloud wants to sit between somewhere in between Heroku and AWS. A little comparison table of cost & features would be interesting to se.

pclark 15y ago

I think people are confused by this pricing because you get so much on the free package.

pbreit 15y ago

It would be cool to see some set of Fabric or other scripts come together which offer some of the capabilities DotCloud is providing but that you can use on your own infrastructure or host.

tzury 15y ago

To Guys@DotCloud, Make sure you remove the last dot "." on the api-key. as copy/paste yield to "error: Authorization rejected" and one shall go and manually edit ~/.dotcloud/dotcloud.conf in order to get back in business

silverlight 15y ago

I have to say, I'm not sure what the benefit of this service is. I understand where you're trying to positon yourselves (a "Heroku for eveything"), but to me that just doesn't work. If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure, I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none. If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services, and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku + RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be comfortable just running things myself on AWS. About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo, etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just using bare-metal AWS, either. I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service providers for a "jack of all trades". EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP, Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby, Redis, CloudDB, others).

llazzaro 15y ago

I cant login to my dotcloud account. I am the only one?

vivekn 15y ago

I was kind of impressed with dotcloud beta, its really simple to mix and match databases and deploy them. But I guess I can't afford $100/mo for hosting my kind of experimental apps. I was expecting a usage based pricing scheme similar to Amazon or ep.io. You guys really need to have some intermediate plans. Its a great product, by the way!