It's my understanding that you're working on your "startup" until you've found a repeatable way to generate profits. Once that occurs you then begin working on your "company".
I think there isn't an exact definition but generally a startup has theoretical hyper growth potential. So opening your own bakery would not qualify, envisioning a franchise chain of bakeries (or a social network etc.) would.
[I don't particularly like this definition but that is the common understanding AFAIK]
I thought the exact same thing while loading up the page. However, I think you should change a few words in your post in an attempt to improve the tone. It reads kinda mean, but maybe that's just me, or maybe that's what's acceptable on HN these days?
I'm not trying to be "PC police" or anything, but when we write comments about people's stuff we need to have a little empathy. I think this would make HN a better, friendlier place.
Btw, I'm not trying to start a fight or argument. I just saw this as an opportunity to call something out that I've noticed on HN far too frequently.
We are still in the process of updating our site. Your point is duly noted. Our product actually automates repetitive marketing tasks like emails, social media posts like tweets / facebook etc... depending on leads's behavior. We are building something similar to marketo and pardot but more simple to use and very cost effective.
Can someone suggest a better hosting platform for us? It don't think Godaddy is helping us scale. We are on the ultra premium hosting option and the site cannot even handle 100 users at the same time.
Hosting like godaddy tends to not differ in performance between their lowest and highest packages, they just differ in cheap resources such as space, bandwidth, "number of allowed email accounts" etc. Processor, memory consumption and maximum concurrent users don't change.
Do you know anyone that is familiar with setting up VM's or managing servers? If so, hit them up and get them to set you up a linode vm (or whatever other provider you want) with nginx. If you don't, perhaps looking at getting a contractor to set you up.
Digital Ocean hits the sweet spot for me with both pricing, availability, speed, and ease of getting up and running for a project like this. You can have a new server up and running in 30 seconds and locked down within 10.
In the short term, switching most pages to static html would do wonders for speed and let you work out a long-term strategy. Static pages behind something like nginx should handle any load.
Your problem might not be your host (thought Godaddy is unlikely to be good), as much as a lack of caching on whatever website software you're using (WP?).
You can slap a caching plugins on wordpress and make 99.99% of requests never hit the database... usually takes you from being able to serve 10 requests per core to a few 100.... (Not as good as static HTML, but I am not sure he needs the million pages per second yet)
Yes sure, by short-term I meant for the next few hours - static html might be an easier option when the server is on fire. Think of it as a poor man's caching :)
+1 to codelitt's suggestion. We've been running our stack for Tenreads (http://tenreads.io) on DO since the last year now. Wouldn't say we are running a high throughput flow for our backend/web apps, but with our core pipelines, DO has been a really good choice with, to quote codelitt again, "sweet spot of cost and performance".
PS: We've been facing issues with certain regions of late, but the team is fairly responsive and helpful with getting fixes through.
Use DigitalOcean ( Cheap & reliable but sometimes I feel that my speeds are capped ), But if you need high performance you should go with Dedicated server ( Online.net or OVH )
P.S I've been using Digitalocean for about 19months now. (edit)
I used DO for a few years and had wild network performance swings at various times. Vultr has been much better in that regard. I also prefer Vultr's administration panel over DO's. They have more datacenter locations, too.
yeah... chennai has a better startup ecosystem compared to other metros. More than that, this is where I grew up. I was able to convince few of my college friends to join me and help me get this venture started.
Nice post, congratulations and all the very best for your venture.
I'm from Chennai too and at some point plan on starting a company there, it was nice to read through the planning, experience etc. Thanks for sharing!
Sure. Thanks for the advice. I was trying to post my experience in launching a startup and not detailing into what the startup does. We are working on simplified marketing automation platform that does email and social media automation depending on customer's online behavior. Very similar to marketo and pardot but simplified and priced for small business
I like the story, but I think you should explain upfront what the service is. Most people have a 8 second attention span, so you want to get the point of what your service does across in a fast way.
Sure thing. Point noted. We are working on marketing automation platform similar to marketo and pardot, but simplified for small businesses and at an affordable price point.
How's your experience with legalzoom? I'm in the process of incorporate my side project, and as a not US person I'm looking on the best way to do it. From opening the company, the bank account (without having to take a plane and go to the US just for that), and also all the work that needs to be done during the year (taxes, accounting, and I guess many more)
The process has been fairly simple. You need to have atleast one person having SSN in order to incorporate the company. I can help you with more details on type of corporation, bank account and few other details. Please email me lenin@maaxmarket.com
Please allow 5 mins. we are hosting the server right now in Microsoft Azure. We will keep you posted when the site is up. Our site crashed due to huge volume of traffic
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 1905 ms ] thread[I don't particularly like this definition but that is the common understanding AFAIK]
You might also want to explain what it is your software actually does. "Marketing Automation" is fairly broad in scope.
I'm not trying to be "PC police" or anything, but when we write comments about people's stuff we need to have a little empathy. I think this would make HN a better, friendlier place.
Btw, I'm not trying to start a fight or argument. I just saw this as an opportunity to call something out that I've noticed on HN far too frequently.
They want us to move to a VPS and we need to migrate our site to a better server soon
Do you know anyone that is familiar with setting up VM's or managing servers? If so, hit them up and get them to set you up a linode vm (or whatever other provider you want) with nginx. If you don't, perhaps looking at getting a contractor to set you up.
Bryan Kennedy has a great write up to help you get it set up and locked down: http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essen...
We put our own twist on it which improves on his base (mostly security related): https://github.com/codelittinc/incubator-resources/blob/mast...
Your problem might not be your host (thought Godaddy is unlikely to be good), as much as a lack of caching on whatever website software you're using (WP?).
PS: We've been facing issues with certain regions of late, but the team is fairly responsive and helpful with getting fixes through.
P.S I've been using Digitalocean for about 19months now. (edit)
(not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer)
The things that most annoy me about digital ocean (No S3 like thing, no way to change your ratio of CPU to Memory to Disk) seem the same.
Edit - Noticed the giant hard drive instances. Super interesting. That could be enough to make me flip.
Happens in both Chrome and FF 41 on OSX. I was able to close one of the overlays and successfully submit the other one.