4 ms·

The initial question that comes to mind is: how will this be sustainable? It's all well and good to offer this service, but will it be a drain on your finances

by mdasen 14y ago

The initial question that comes to mind is: how will this be sustainable? It's all well and good to offer this service, but will it be a drain on your finances 6 months down the road? Will it become a drain if more than 250 people sign up for it? I understand that one can get a server with 128GB of SSD storage, quad core, and 16GB of RAM for around $100/mo if one looks enough, but that would only serve 256 people at your quotas. Would you be able to offer the service if you had to spend $1,000/mo? As a follow-up: why should I use Dotgeek over Heroku or AppFog? Both of those are commercial offerings with a free tier, but their commercial pricing makes me a lot more confident that it will stick around. What are you offering that trumps their offering? Kudos for trying things (and I'm not trying to sound harsh at all). Still, this feels like it would have been more interesting in 2006 than today where we have many options at free tiers and even more paid services to choose from. I guess I'm just wondering why I would want to sign up for this rather than something else. If this is more about learning systems administration, then it's an awesome project and I'm sure you'll learn a lot and gain great experience. It's awesome to try things even if they aren't meant to be commercial alternative services just to get the experience of doing them.

rdevnull 14y ago
Hello Mdasen ! thanks for your comment and the very good questions. To start with a quick answer: "Would you be able to offer the service if you had to spend $1,000/mo?" Yes :) At the moment we have 3 servers and we are far from full capacity. Of course nothing can scale to the infinite but, from what I could observe, there are always people coming and going. We do have bigger hard disks than 128 gb so the quota in a single server is higher than 250 or it should be. Why should you use 1.ai dotgeek over heroku or appfog ? If you do have a commercial application you should run in a paid service because, in the end, hosting your commercial or critical app will depend on support. This said our space is for developers/geeks/learners that want to try something not necessarily commercial. Another reason I would see vs. Heroku free (I think is only fair to compare with the free option) is that here you do have a simple SFTP access and you run things like in the "old days"- your way. We also give MySQL which is not part of Heroku free. I also feel that the performance of an app in our server would be better vs. others free tiers. I think that both Heroko and AppFog are great concepts as they take away the servers duty from your hands. We do not compete with any paid service hence it is only entirely free and somehow "as is". I agree that this might be useless to many yet I would think that for a young developer - student or really anyone that wants to try something without any financial commitment it is a pretty good offer. Thanks for the kudos (I don't think you have been harsh at all) I think dropping your app via SFTP (being Ruby, PHP or even a perl app with Dancer) is a very straightforward process and could be useful. Judging from the great numbers of signups after this post I think that at least some are curious which is always great ! Thanks again David
- codesuela 14y ago
  FWIW you can get the ClearDB or Xeround addon (MySQL) for free on Heroku.
  - rdevnull 14y ago
    oh sorry if I missed that. Actually I just checked again and It looks like for free you can get only a web dyno with no worker ?(I always get confused by this) DB is limited to 10K rows we have 512MB but in any case we are not competing with Heroku at all - more power to heroku which is certainly a great service :)
- yahelc 14y ago
  Minor copywriting note: The autoresponder email says "your hosting space request is now under approval.", instead of "under review".
  - rdevnull 14y ago
    will fix it - thanks for the feedback. Just approved your application :)
  - rdevnull 14y ago
    fixed now thanks again for spotting this
pygorex 14y ago
Sustainability of the service is a concern, so I wouldn't use it for anything mission-critical. Still, I applied mainly so I could have a place to host and stage a few different open source PHP and Rails projects I'm working on. The application process should allow them to rate-limit new signups. And shut down new accounts if their infrastructure starts hitting limits. Also - Hopefully they're not afraid to slam down the ban hammer on abusive accounts.
- rdevnull 14y ago
  I approved your account so you should be ready to go. Good observation about the "mission-critical" part. As you can see after the login this is clearly specified pretty much everywhere. We are indeed keeping a close eye on abuse and, as specified in the EULA, we have zero tolerance on this as it is essential to keep it functional and fast. Thanks again for giving it a try :)

by mdasen 14y ago

rdevnull 14y ago

Hello Mdasen ! thanks for your comment and the very good questions. To start with a quick answer: "Would you be able to offer the service if you had to spend $1,000/mo?" Yes :) At the moment we have 3 servers and we are far from full capacity. Of course nothing can scale to the infinite but, from what I could observe, there are always people coming and going. We do have bigger hard disks than 128 gb so the quota in a single server is higher than 250 or it should be. Why should you use 1.ai dotgeek over heroku or appfog ? If you do have a commercial application you should run in a paid service because, in the end, hosting your commercial or critical app will depend on support. This said our space is for developers/geeks/learners that want to try something not necessarily commercial. Another reason I would see vs. Heroku free (I think is only fair to compare with the free option) is that here you do have a simple SFTP access and you run things like in the "old days"- your way. We also give MySQL which is not part of Heroku free. I also feel that the performance of an app in our server would be better vs. others free tiers. I think that both Heroko and AppFog are great concepts as they take away the servers duty from your hands. We do not compete with any paid service hence it is only entirely free and somehow "as is". I agree that this might be useless to many yet I would think that for a young developer - student or really anyone that wants to try something without any financial commitment it is a pretty good offer. Thanks for the kudos (I don't think you have been harsh at all) I think dropping your app via SFTP (being Ruby, PHP or even a perl app with Dancer) is a very straightforward process and could be useful. Judging from the great numbers of signups after this post I think that at least some are curious which is always great ! Thanks again David

codesuela 14y ago
FWIW you can get the ClearDB or Xeround addon (MySQL) for free on Heroku.
- rdevnull 14y ago
  oh sorry if I missed that. Actually I just checked again and It looks like for free you can get only a web dyno with no worker ?(I always get confused by this) DB is limited to 10K rows we have 512MB but in any case we are not competing with Heroku at all - more power to heroku which is certainly a great service :)
yahelc 14y ago
Minor copywriting note: The autoresponder email says "your hosting space request is now under approval.", instead of "under review".
- rdevnull 14y ago
  will fix it - thanks for the feedback. Just approved your application :)
- rdevnull 14y ago
  fixed now thanks again for spotting this

pygorex 14y ago

Sustainability of the service is a concern, so I wouldn't use it for anything mission-critical. Still, I applied mainly so I could have a place to host and stage a few different open source PHP and Rails projects I'm working on. The application process should allow them to rate-limit new signups. And shut down new accounts if their infrastructure starts hitting limits. Also - Hopefully they're not afraid to slam down the ban hammer on abusive accounts.

rdevnull 14y ago
I approved your account so you should be ready to go. Good observation about the "mission-critical" part. As you can see after the login this is clearly specified pretty much everywhere. We are indeed keeping a close eye on abuse and, as specified in the EULA, we have zero tolerance on this as it is essential to keep it functional and fast. Thanks again for giving it a try :)