7 ms·

DotCloud updates pricing, uses new elastic pricing model

62 points by sgrove 14y ago

StavrosK 14y ago
Every time I see a cloud pricing page, I think "this is 100x more expensive than my 50 Eur Hetzner server". It's hard to get excited when I see 1 GB of total RAM costing $350 when my 24 GB, 2 TB, i7 server costs $60. Sure, scalability, blabla, but if you're talking startup-friendly, then a dedicated server is hundreds of times cheaper. I always regret getting a Linode box for historious rather than a Hetzner server.
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  +1 Everyone agrees with you that dedicated boxes rented from companies like Hetzner are a much better deal for what resource you get for your money. However managing servers is a form of technical debt. A lot of private corporate and public web apps are written, deployed, and not changed much assuming that they do what people need. "Set and forget" PaaS reduces technical debt. That said, I have been thinking myself of getting one large memory Hetzner box to replace machine learning and other background stuff that I might otherwise do with Elastic MapReduce. Scale vertically rather than horizontally.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    I definitely agree with you. This is why, nowadays, I design all my deployments to be repeatable, and document what cannot be (not much, so far). I get a Hetzner box that I know will probably last me for the lifetime of the app. If it doesn't, and I actually have ten million users, I have a good problem, and will study how to overcome it at that point. I think I don't need the cloud until I need a fourth dedicated server. That sounds like a good rule of thumb. It also depends on your growth rate, if it looks like another server will last me another five years, why pick a cloud offering? I think that EC2/dotcloud/etc are pretty close to the metal anyway, it seems to me that you get the high prices with fewer benefits. Can someone tell me what the advantage of EC2 is, given that each dedicated server has 32 GB RAM and no contention, and that EBS is known to be really flaky?
    - gabrielgrant 14y ago
      While you're right that EC2 is pretty close the metal, dotCloud starts at a very different level of abstraction. On most VPS providers (as with dedicated hosting) the first question you answer when you go to deploy your web app is "what Linux distro do you want to run?" If you're trying to learn sys admin skills, that's great, but for most people, the end goal is to deploy a web app, not run a Linux box. With dotCloud, you start higher up: list the components (eg Python web frontend, MySQL and Redis) that make up your actual application, push your code and you're handed back a URL with your app running. A single command lets you scale out for reliability, with load balancing across your multiple web front-ends and master-slave replication for your databases. Running a single physical server? Sure, not that hard. Setting up reliable, automated failover for every component in your stack? That's a bit more work. In the end, it's really a question of the value of your time. Can you do all your own sys admin work? Sure. You could also build and maintain your own hardware, but from the sounds of it, you've decided that work is worth outsourcing Hetzner. In the same way, for a lot of people, wasting time administering servers is just time taken away from building a real business: a distraction that is worth paying a few extra dollars a month to make disappear.
  - rubyrescue 14y ago
    Using Heroku is a different form of technical debt.
    - ohgodthecat 14y ago
      Heroku still seems to have the normal form of technical debt because every time it fails people are told they are to blame because they didn't set up redundancy, but that should be part of the reason you are paying so much.
- shykes 14y ago
  Hi Stavrosk, I work at dotCloud. I understand your concern. However allow me to contribute 3 points: - If you think of dotCloud as expensive hosting, then don't use it because you're missing the key value proposition. DotCloud is affordable managed hosting: we do the work of operating, monitoring, maintaining which you would otherwise need to do yourself. And we do it better and more cost-effectively than our customers could do it, because it's all we do for hundreds of thousands of deployments. - dotCloud scales down way better than iaas. What's the cheapest ec2 setup with production trafic, load-balancing, failover and monitoring, plus a bunch of sandbox environments? Hint: we're cheaper. - Our large customers benefit from volume discounts
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Hmm, affordable managed hosting sounds better. If I need, say, my Postgres instance tuned to my specific workloads, is that included in the price? I assume service configurations are editable, please correct me if I'm wrong. What do you guys manage exactly? What sort of work am I saving if I get dotcloud?
    - shykes 14y ago
      Here's a non-exhaustive list of things we take care of for you: - We curate a configuration of each service that "just works", and we maintain it over time for upgrades and security patches. - We implement scaling and reliability best practices for each service: load-balancing, deployment across multiple datacenters, database replication and failover, hot deploy, strict change management, etc. We do this in production at a very large scale, so even for a very small application you benefit from the equivalent of a 20-people ops team serving tens of millions of uniques. - We actively monitor and support everything we deploy, and are on call 24/7 to fix things when they break. This is important because 100% automation never happens in the real world. When things break we fix them, or help you fix them. We've been known to fix bugs in our customer's code, but don't tell anybody :) Our job is to be a provider you can trust to run your stuff in the long run. That's what PaaS is supposed to be.
      - 14y ago
- cmelbye 14y ago
  Is that server still available? The cheapest one I see on the site is ~$100/month.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Not only is it available, but they recently removed the setup fee as well: www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex
pieter 14y ago
I don't understand the sample budgets -- is that cost per hour? day? week? month? Why don't they specify something as basic as that somewhere?
- shykes 14y ago
  Hi Pieter, sample budgets are per month. We'll update the page to make it clearer. Thanks for the feedback!
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    Looking at the sample pricing I am having a hard time understanding what that means for a simple website for example... Lets say I have a Python Django app that gets 10k hits a month, and it uses PostgreSQL on the backend. What will that set me back? How will I know how much memory to scale by? I am an engineer and I find this extremely difficult to grok...
    - jpetazzo 14y ago
      Well, it's impossible to give an universal response. It's like trying to guess how much you will pay on gas on your daily commute without knowing the distance or the kind of car you're driving. It depends how much work is done in each "hit". If 99% of those 10k hits are to display the 10 most recent entries in a table, a very small setup will take you very far. A couple of 96 MB Python front-ends, 64 MB for SQL, you would pay maybe about $40/mo for a decent setup. Now if most of the hits trigger complex geographic queries against a database of millions of records, with a high write/read ratio, it's a whole different story. You need to know about the size of your working set (you can then infer your database memory requirements), and have a rough idea of the average request time and concurrency (to infer your number of workers, if you're using a synchronous server like most deployments of Django or Rails). While the "per-megabyte" price will be higher than "raw hosting", keep in mind that the granularity will allow you to do huge savings. Instead of paying for this 1.7 GB instance, you can pay for just 200 or 300 MB of RAM if that's what your app requires :-)
    - ARothfusz 14y ago
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I just wrote about this (http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/06/more-on-paas-new-dotcloud-pricing-and.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/06/more-on-paas-new-dotcloud...). I wonder if the free sandbox vs. "live" setups will encourage more developers to transition to paid services, and not permanently host small web apps for free.
- sgrove 14y ago
  Well, what's the value in the free, small web apps? Ultimately some money, and maybe even a small company's worth of money, but not enough to affect the bottom line of a company the size of what dotCloud is aiming for. Being able to get little apps up and running quickly for free (just like on Heroku) is a great marketing tool, and a feeder for bigger accounts. Any app that's serious will quickly outpace the sandbox (horizontal/vertical scaling, failover, loadbalancing, etc.) And there's little point in trying to extract value from apps that aren't generating enough value themselves. Seems like a very smart move to me.
rwhitman 14y ago
Suddenly this service became a lot more interesting to me
moe 14y ago
This is easily one of the worst pricing pages I have ever seen. Your pricing scheme is extraordinarily complex and the page does the poorest possible job at explaining anything. Heck, it doesn't even mention that RAM is your discriminator - it simply implies it as if that was natural. Moreover none of the terms are explained (what is "Vertical Scaling", what is "Proportional to application memory")... There is not even a calculator/slider to get a rough idea of actual cost without engaging in Excel-gymnastics. You should seriously get outside help for this.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  I wouldn't say it's the worst, but it's pretty poor. The page doesn't mention whether it's per day, month, or year for example, but they seem to be taking feedback from a couple of the other comments. Not sure why you've been downvoted for this, seems a bit harsh.
- shykes 14y ago
  Hi moe, thanks for the feedback, I suppose it's the elastic nature of the pricing that you find complex? I can't disagree with you, it is less straightforward than flat monthly plans. However it is what litteraly thousands of developers have been asking us for over the last year. Our previous pricing was focused on simplicity... but ended up sweeping the reality of our product under tbe rug. I think you're right that we don't explain enough on the pricing page. Our concern was text overload., but there's probably a balance to be found. What about the content - any opinion on our actual pricing?
  - moe 14y ago
    Imho you need sliders, like Heroku. But that's just my gut reaction. What you really need is a webdesigner who can lay down an approachable visualization for such a complex pricing scheme (which will probably involve sliders, and also big honking tooltips). As for your actual pricing - I don't know. It wasn't obvious from the page what a small/medium/large deployment would cost and I didn't bother to fire up excel to figure out a number that you should absolutely spoon-feed me.
Ecio78 14y ago
in the $172.80 sample you have a typo: "PostreSQL"
- KenCochrane 14y ago
  Thank you for letting us know, we will get that fixed.
glesica 14y ago
The sample budgets are nice, but why not just say "$4.32 per 32MB of RAM per month". Also, what's with the jump from $8 to $80? Seems like quite a few people would be interested in hosting something between those two price points...
shykes 14y ago
Hi all, thanks for all the feedback! We've pushed an update to the pricing page based on your suggestions: https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html
- detst 14y ago
  The top complaint was typical hyperbolic contrarianism. The first page provided the basics well enough for you to get feedback on where to improve. It wasn't that bad. Links to more explanations (i.e. horizontal vs. vertical scaling, details of CPU resources, memory allocated to sandbox apps, etc.) and a cost calculator would be sufficient. Now you've taken away information.
patrickgzill 14y ago
There are 512, 32MB chunks in a 16GB RAM server (let's say with overhead, you need 32GB RAM). $512 * $4 = over $2000 per month, for a single server that you can buy for about $2000 and colocate for maybe $100-$150 per month. Sure, you can buy it in little pieces, and sure, it is managed, but really!
qikquestion 14y ago
I like to use this for my redis setup...what about the data backups for the persistent data..do you manage that?..If yes..what is the frequency ? I think you should provide more data for database services..especially for redis about the memory, disk space & connections. I like to move from redistogo if comparable metrics are provided.
kmfrk 14y ago
The grey, grainy background makes for really bad contrast on the website. The layout seems nice, but the contrast brings down the readability and aesthetics orders of magnitude. I can imagine colour-blind or bespectacled users find it particularly straining to read.

62 points by sgrove 14y ago

Every time I see a cloud pricing page, I think "this is 100x more expensive than my 50 Eur Hetzner server". It's hard to get excited when I see 1 GB of total RAM costing $350 when my 24 GB, 2 TB, i7 server costs $60. Sure, scalability, blabla, but if you're talking startup-friendly, then a dedicated server is hundreds of times cheaper. I always regret getting a Linode box for historious rather than a Hetzner server.

mark_l_watson 14y ago
+1 Everyone agrees with you that dedicated boxes rented from companies like Hetzner are a much better deal for what resource you get for your money. However managing servers is a form of technical debt. A lot of private corporate and public web apps are written, deployed, and not changed much assuming that they do what people need. "Set and forget" PaaS reduces technical debt. That said, I have been thinking myself of getting one large memory Hetzner box to replace machine learning and other background stuff that I might otherwise do with Elastic MapReduce. Scale vertically rather than horizontally.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  I definitely agree with you. This is why, nowadays, I design all my deployments to be repeatable, and document what cannot be (not much, so far). I get a Hetzner box that I know will probably last me for the lifetime of the app. If it doesn't, and I actually have ten million users, I have a good problem, and will study how to overcome it at that point. I think I don't need the cloud until I need a fourth dedicated server. That sounds like a good rule of thumb. It also depends on your growth rate, if it looks like another server will last me another five years, why pick a cloud offering? I think that EC2/dotcloud/etc are pretty close to the metal anyway, it seems to me that you get the high prices with fewer benefits. Can someone tell me what the advantage of EC2 is, given that each dedicated server has 32 GB RAM and no contention, and that EBS is known to be really flaky?
  - gabrielgrant 14y ago
    While you're right that EC2 is pretty close the metal, dotCloud starts at a very different level of abstraction. On most VPS providers (as with dedicated hosting) the first question you answer when you go to deploy your web app is "what Linux distro do you want to run?" If you're trying to learn sys admin skills, that's great, but for most people, the end goal is to deploy a web app, not run a Linux box. With dotCloud, you start higher up: list the components (eg Python web frontend, MySQL and Redis) that make up your actual application, push your code and you're handed back a URL with your app running. A single command lets you scale out for reliability, with load balancing across your multiple web front-ends and master-slave replication for your databases. Running a single physical server? Sure, not that hard. Setting up reliable, automated failover for every component in your stack? That's a bit more work. In the end, it's really a question of the value of your time. Can you do all your own sys admin work? Sure. You could also build and maintain your own hardware, but from the sounds of it, you've decided that work is worth outsourcing Hetzner. In the same way, for a lot of people, wasting time administering servers is just time taken away from building a real business: a distraction that is worth paying a few extra dollars a month to make disappear.
- rubyrescue 14y ago
  Using Heroku is a different form of technical debt.
  - ohgodthecat 14y ago
    Heroku still seems to have the normal form of technical debt because every time it fails people are told they are to blame because they didn't set up redundancy, but that should be part of the reason you are paying so much.
shykes 14y ago
Hi Stavrosk, I work at dotCloud. I understand your concern. However allow me to contribute 3 points: - If you think of dotCloud as expensive hosting, then don't use it because you're missing the key value proposition. DotCloud is affordable managed hosting: we do the work of operating, monitoring, maintaining which you would otherwise need to do yourself. And we do it better and more cost-effectively than our customers could do it, because it's all we do for hundreds of thousands of deployments. - dotCloud scales down way better than iaas. What's the cheapest ec2 setup with production trafic, load-balancing, failover and monitoring, plus a bunch of sandbox environments? Hint: we're cheaper. - Our large customers benefit from volume discounts
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Hmm, affordable managed hosting sounds better. If I need, say, my Postgres instance tuned to my specific workloads, is that included in the price? I assume service configurations are editable, please correct me if I'm wrong. What do you guys manage exactly? What sort of work am I saving if I get dotcloud?
  - shykes 14y ago
    Here's a non-exhaustive list of things we take care of for you: - We curate a configuration of each service that "just works", and we maintain it over time for upgrades and security patches. - We implement scaling and reliability best practices for each service: load-balancing, deployment across multiple datacenters, database replication and failover, hot deploy, strict change management, etc. We do this in production at a very large scale, so even for a very small application you benefit from the equivalent of a 20-people ops team serving tens of millions of uniques. - We actively monitor and support everything we deploy, and are on call 24/7 to fix things when they break. This is important because 100% automation never happens in the real world. When things break we fix them, or help you fix them. We've been known to fix bugs in our customer's code, but don't tell anybody :) Our job is to be a provider you can trust to run your stuff in the long run. That's what PaaS is supposed to be.
    - 14y ago
cmelbye 14y ago
Is that server still available? The cheapest one I see on the site is ~$100/month.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Not only is it available, but they recently removed the setup fee as well: www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex

pieter 14y ago

I don't understand the sample budgets -- is that cost per hour? day? week? month? Why don't they specify something as basic as that somewhere?

shykes 14y ago
Hi Pieter, sample budgets are per month. We'll update the page to make it clearer. Thanks for the feedback!
- X-Istence 14y ago
  Looking at the sample pricing I am having a hard time understanding what that means for a simple website for example... Lets say I have a Python Django app that gets 10k hits a month, and it uses PostgreSQL on the backend. What will that set me back? How will I know how much memory to scale by? I am an engineer and I find this extremely difficult to grok...
  - jpetazzo 14y ago
    Well, it's impossible to give an universal response. It's like trying to guess how much you will pay on gas on your daily commute without knowing the distance or the kind of car you're driving. It depends how much work is done in each "hit". If 99% of those 10k hits are to display the 10 most recent entries in a table, a very small setup will take you very far. A couple of 96 MB Python front-ends, 64 MB for SQL, you would pay maybe about $40/mo for a decent setup. Now if most of the hits trigger complex geographic queries against a database of millions of records, with a high write/read ratio, it's a whole different story. You need to know about the size of your working set (you can then infer your database memory requirements), and have a rough idea of the average request time and concurrency (to infer your number of workers, if you're using a synchronous server like most deployments of Django or Rails). While the "per-megabyte" price will be higher than "raw hosting", keep in mind that the granularity will allow you to do huge savings. Instead of paying for this 1.7 GB instance, you can pay for just 200 or 300 MB of RAM if that's what your app requires :-)
  - ARothfusz 14y ago

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I just wrote about this (http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/06/more-on-paas-new-dotcloud-pricing-and.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/06/more-on-paas-new-dotcloud...). I wonder if the free sandbox vs. "live" setups will encourage more developers to transition to paid services, and not permanently host small web apps for free.

sgrove 14y ago
Well, what's the value in the free, small web apps? Ultimately some money, and maybe even a small company's worth of money, but not enough to affect the bottom line of a company the size of what dotCloud is aiming for. Being able to get little apps up and running quickly for free (just like on Heroku) is a great marketing tool, and a feeder for bigger accounts. Any app that's serious will quickly outpace the sandbox (horizontal/vertical scaling, failover, loadbalancing, etc.) And there's little point in trying to extract value from apps that aren't generating enough value themselves. Seems like a very smart move to me.

rwhitman 14y ago

Suddenly this service became a lot more interesting to me

moe 14y ago

This is easily one of the worst pricing pages I have ever seen. Your pricing scheme is extraordinarily complex and the page does the poorest possible job at explaining anything. Heck, it doesn't even mention that RAM is your discriminator - it simply implies it as if that was natural. Moreover none of the terms are explained (what is "Vertical Scaling", what is "Proportional to application memory")... There is not even a calculator/slider to get a rough idea of actual cost without engaging in Excel-gymnastics. You should seriously get outside help for this.

EwanToo 14y ago
I wouldn't say it's the worst, but it's pretty poor. The page doesn't mention whether it's per day, month, or year for example, but they seem to be taking feedback from a couple of the other comments. Not sure why you've been downvoted for this, seems a bit harsh.
shykes 14y ago
Hi moe, thanks for the feedback, I suppose it's the elastic nature of the pricing that you find complex? I can't disagree with you, it is less straightforward than flat monthly plans. However it is what litteraly thousands of developers have been asking us for over the last year. Our previous pricing was focused on simplicity... but ended up sweeping the reality of our product under tbe rug. I think you're right that we don't explain enough on the pricing page. Our concern was text overload., but there's probably a balance to be found. What about the content - any opinion on our actual pricing?
- moe 14y ago
  Imho you need sliders, like Heroku. But that's just my gut reaction. What you really need is a webdesigner who can lay down an approachable visualization for such a complex pricing scheme (which will probably involve sliders, and also big honking tooltips). As for your actual pricing - I don't know. It wasn't obvious from the page what a small/medium/large deployment would cost and I didn't bother to fire up excel to figure out a number that you should absolutely spoon-feed me.

Ecio78 14y ago

in the $172.80 sample you have a typo: "PostreSQL"

KenCochrane 14y ago
Thank you for letting us know, we will get that fixed.

glesica 14y ago

The sample budgets are nice, but why not just say "$4.32 per 32MB of RAM per month". Also, what's with the jump from $8 to $80? Seems like quite a few people would be interested in hosting something between those two price points...

shykes 14y ago

Hi all, thanks for all the feedback! We've pushed an update to the pricing page based on your suggestions: https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html

detst 14y ago
The top complaint was typical hyperbolic contrarianism. The first page provided the basics well enough for you to get feedback on where to improve. It wasn't that bad. Links to more explanations (i.e. horizontal vs. vertical scaling, details of CPU resources, memory allocated to sandbox apps, etc.) and a cost calculator would be sufficient. Now you've taken away information.

patrickgzill 14y ago

There are 512, 32MB chunks in a 16GB RAM server (let's say with overhead, you need 32GB RAM). $512 * $4 = over $2000 per month, for a single server that you can buy for about $2000 and colocate for maybe $100-$150 per month. Sure, you can buy it in little pieces, and sure, it is managed, but really!

qikquestion 14y ago

I like to use this for my redis setup...what about the data backups for the persistent data..do you manage that?..If yes..what is the frequency ? I think you should provide more data for database services..especially for redis about the memory, disk space & connections. I like to move from redistogo if comparable metrics are provided.

kmfrk 14y ago

The grey, grainy background makes for really bad contrast on the website. The layout seems nice, but the contrast brings down the readability and aesthetics orders of magnitude. I can imagine colour-blind or bespectacled users find it particularly straining to read.