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Aye. I've done work for a startup (flipped, now owned by a larger company) that has a massive portfolio of domains. It leases out directory listings and sells d

Aye. I've done work for a startup (flipped, now owned by a larger company) that has a massive portfolio of domains. It leases out directory listings and sells domains. :( It seems a common problem that "safe bet" ripoff ideas get funding. Atlassian is the big local exception (along with some other small groups like http://crowdhired.com http://crowdhired.com, http://99dresses.com http://99dresses.com and http://orionvm.com.au http://orionvm.com.au). On the other hand you have DesignCrowd, and other funded copycat startups like http://spreets.com.au http://spreets.com.au, http://pygg.co http://pygg.co and http://wooboard.com http://wooboard.com.

nl 15y ago
BigCommerce isn't a rip-off, and it's a really good platform (from what I've seen). OrionVM.... it's a good idea, but not exactly innovative. But then, "innovative" is worth nothing on its own.
- damncabbage 15y ago
  Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though. I see what you mean about BigCommerce. The admin panel is painful (and I've heard that the actual system is hell for their employees to hack on), but they're definitely doing a roaring trade, and the instructional articles and videos they provide along with their actual product are rather useful. The environment the Australian startup scene is a bit odd. We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa), so we effectively have a little "bubble" in which we can set up paid products without much fear of the existing US startups stomping all over us. Interesting times.
  - nl 15y ago
    Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though. They fixed that speed of light problem? :) We're going to be stuck on 100ms ping times until that is fixed (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at+speed+of+light http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at...) OTOH, I'm not sure what they will do when Amazon opens their datacenter (if that really is their plan). We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa) That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. Plus there is always Paypal. (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem)
    - damncabbage 15y ago
      That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. It is if you want to display your prices in US Dollars to American visitors: http://blog.angrymonkeys.com.au/why-being-an-aussie-startup-sucks http://blog.angrymonkeys.com.au/why-being-an-aussie-startup-... (with discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098224 ) Summary: You CAN do it if you have enough cash. (This post also addresses the PayPal point. You're stuck with Payflow Pro, which is much pricier, especially for a bootstrapped startup.) (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem) Point. (They won't usually quote prices in AUD, but that's much less of a problem.)
    - sanswork 15y ago
      I don't see Amazon opening up an AU datacentre for a very long time(and probably never). They have Singapore now which will cover a much larger market then Australia will ever be for them.
      - orionvmjoseph 15y ago
        It's coming sooner than you may think.. However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future. Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers. Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.
        nl 15y ago
        It's coming sooner than you may think.. That's what I hear too (I work in an area fairly closely related) - although some think it might be just a CDN node.
      - robryan 15y ago
- asharp 15y ago
  Not exactly innovative? Interesting. Would you mind telling me what gave you that impression? The most common reaction we get is that we should sell off our tech and not bother being a service provider. Mostly because we are, at the end of the day, a tech company. Just to take a moment to explain. From the point of view of the consumer: - I want to make a virtual server on demand. It must be HA, must have hard disks that are reasonable and I need out of band management in case I lock myself out. - I need a proper virtual network on demand. I need to be able to set my own ip addresses, use multicast (say for db replication for rack), etc. I want to be able to have multiple virtual networks, attach multiple networks to the same machine. I want to be able to connect up over MPLS or a crossover into one of these virtual networks. Basically, people don't want randomly crippled servers. They want a virtualised datacenter. Can any other provider do this, at scale? We call this the virtual datacenter paradigm and we think that this is the future for cloud. It's also basically impossible to build, which is surprisingly convenient. Disclaimer -> I'm Alex Sharp, VP Development at OrionVM.
  - nl 15y ago
    Forgive me, I probably have a very superficial understanding of what you do, and additionally I get all the Australian "Cloud" server providers confused. I thought you were mostly doing the Citrix Cloud.com platform (which manages most of the setup you discuss), on Xen hypervisors. I'm not discounting the engineering effort here, and I'm sure there is something I's missing. Disclaimer -> I work for a (very) indirect competitor. Edit: further discussion makes it clear you have built your own storage platform. That is innovative, but isn't exactly clear from your website.
    - asharp 15y ago
      Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans. CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san. Most of the others are all Vmware and such, all on fairly standard hardware. And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....) But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way: - Take a standard HPC cluster - Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks - Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes - Build on a full cloud orch stack on top. This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper. So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.
- orionvmjoseph 15y ago
  Hi, I'm Joseph. Another of the OrionVM Founders. :) To add to what Alex said above.. I think the major misconceptions are caused by the fact that most of what we are doing is done much like a "stealth" mode startup. We -are- a service provider, but under the hood we are very much a tech company building the next generation of IaaS technologies. That is not to say we won't just be a service provider in the future - but only there is much more happening here at OrionHQ. For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits. We very much pride ourselves on being an innovative company and I just wanted to communicate that we aren't an Amazon clone. But this post is getting long in the tooth and I don't want to come off as a "butthurt founder". :P Welcome to have a chat with anyone interested in what we do, we are also hiring btw! :) Capt Obvious Disclaimer: I am an OrionVM founder.
  - nl 15y ago
    For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits. Do you sell this tech?
    - asharp 15y ago
      Everybody wants us to sell it. We currently arn't aiming to, though. We are wholesaling this though, and we are looking at massively stepping it up. If you're interested, come talk to us.
mambodog 15y ago
The funny (sad) thing about DesignCrowd is that they're copying another Australian startup.
daemin 15y ago
I think half the reason why so many copy-cat start-ups get started and funded in Australia is that the big "proper" startups - the originals - take their damn sweet time in getting here. Since there is a significantly long delay (months if not years), that's plenty of time to get a startup off the ground and running.

nl 15y ago

BigCommerce isn't a rip-off, and it's a really good platform (from what I've seen). OrionVM.... it's a good idea, but not exactly innovative. But then, "innovative" is worth nothing on its own.

damncabbage 15y ago
Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though. I see what you mean about BigCommerce. The admin panel is painful (and I've heard that the actual system is hell for their employees to hack on), but they're definitely doing a roaring trade, and the instructional articles and videos they provide along with their actual product are rather useful. The environment the Australian startup scene is a bit odd. We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa), so we effectively have a little "bubble" in which we can set up paid products without much fear of the existing US startups stomping all over us. Interesting times.
- nl 15y ago
  Point taken about OrionVM. I worry about their long-term future as speed to the US becomes less of an issue, though. They fixed that speed of light problem? :) We're going to be stuck on 100ms ping times until that is fixed (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at+speed+of+light http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sydney+to+los+angles+at...) OTOH, I'm not sure what they will do when Amazon opens their datacenter (if that really is their plan). We can't (easily) accept payment from US customers (and vice-versa) That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. Plus there is always Paypal. (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem)
  - damncabbage 15y ago
    That's not really true. Yes, it is more work than "include this Javascript file and you can accept payment" (aka Stripe), but if you are prepared to do some work it isn't that big a deal. It is if you want to display your prices in US Dollars to American visitors: http://blog.angrymonkeys.com.au/why-being-an-aussie-startup-sucks http://blog.angrymonkeys.com.au/why-being-an-aussie-startup-... (with discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098224 ) Summary: You CAN do it if you have enough cash. (This post also addresses the PayPal point. You're stuck with Payflow Pro, which is much pricier, especially for a bootstrapped startup.) (Also, most US countries accept Australian payment. Some won't ship here, but that's a different problem) Point. (They won't usually quote prices in AUD, but that's much less of a problem.)
  - sanswork 15y ago
    I don't see Amazon opening up an AU datacentre for a very long time(and probably never). They have Singapore now which will cover a much larger market then Australia will ever be for them.
    - orionvmjoseph 15y ago
      It's coming sooner than you may think.. However it doesn't really pose a risk to our market niche. We differentiate ourselves from Amazon on numerous fronts, primarily performance and paradigm. Both of which are sustainable for the foreseeable future. Amazon coming to Australia mainly poses a risk to traditional VPS hosting and commodity cloud providers. Personally, Amazon joining us here shows that validation and maturity of the market in Australia has been reached and is a big boost to our business.
      - nl 15y ago
        It's coming sooner than you may think.. That's what I hear too (I work in an area fairly closely related) - although some think it might be just a CDN node.
    - robryan 15y ago
asharp 15y ago
Not exactly innovative? Interesting. Would you mind telling me what gave you that impression? The most common reaction we get is that we should sell off our tech and not bother being a service provider. Mostly because we are, at the end of the day, a tech company. Just to take a moment to explain. From the point of view of the consumer: - I want to make a virtual server on demand. It must be HA, must have hard disks that are reasonable and I need out of band management in case I lock myself out. - I need a proper virtual network on demand. I need to be able to set my own ip addresses, use multicast (say for db replication for rack), etc. I want to be able to have multiple virtual networks, attach multiple networks to the same machine. I want to be able to connect up over MPLS or a crossover into one of these virtual networks. Basically, people don't want randomly crippled servers. They want a virtualised datacenter. Can any other provider do this, at scale? We call this the virtual datacenter paradigm and we think that this is the future for cloud. It's also basically impossible to build, which is surprisingly convenient. Disclaimer -> I'm Alex Sharp, VP Development at OrionVM.
- nl 15y ago
  Forgive me, I probably have a very superficial understanding of what you do, and additionally I get all the Australian "Cloud" server providers confused. I thought you were mostly doing the Citrix Cloud.com platform (which manages most of the setup you discuss), on Xen hypervisors. I'm not discounting the engineering effort here, and I'm sure there is something I's missing. Disclaimer -> I work for a (very) indirect competitor. Edit: further discussion makes it clear you have built your own storage platform. That is innovative, but isn't exactly clear from your website.
  - asharp 15y ago
    Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans. CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san. Most of the others are all Vmware and such, all on fairly standard hardware. And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....) But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way: - Take a standard HPC cluster - Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks - Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes - Build on a full cloud orch stack on top. This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper. So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.
orionvmjoseph 15y ago
Hi, I'm Joseph. Another of the OrionVM Founders. :) To add to what Alex said above.. I think the major misconceptions are caused by the fact that most of what we are doing is done much like a "stealth" mode startup. We -are- a service provider, but under the hood we are very much a tech company building the next generation of IaaS technologies. That is not to say we won't just be a service provider in the future - but only there is much more happening here at OrionHQ. For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits. We very much pride ourselves on being an innovative company and I just wanted to communicate that we aren't an Amazon clone. But this post is getting long in the tooth and I don't want to come off as a "butthurt founder". :P Welcome to have a chat with anyone interested in what we do, we are also hiring btw! :) Capt Obvious Disclaimer: I am an OrionVM founder.
- nl 15y ago
  For instance we have developed a fully distributed block storage platform on Infiniband that does away with the scaling and performance issues of EBS, traditional SANs like HDS/Netapp etc. It is also a fraction of the cost to build and maintain, along with having a ton of other benefits. Do you sell this tech?
  - asharp 15y ago
    Everybody wants us to sell it. We currently arn't aiming to, though. We are wholesaling this though, and we are looking at massively stepping it up. If you're interested, come talk to us.

mambodog 15y ago

The funny (sad) thing about DesignCrowd is that they're copying another Australian startup.

daemin 15y ago

I think half the reason why so many copy-cat start-ups get started and funded in Australia is that the big "proper" startups - the originals - take their damn sweet time in getting here. Since there is a significantly long delay (months if not years), that's plenty of time to get a startup off the ground and running.