Ask HN: Please review my startup, www.cloudorado.com
Over last several months I’ve been developing a cloud computing (IaaS) comparison engine. I’ve reached a state where it achieved some usefulness. Therefore I would like to share it with you and get some feedback before I go any further with it.
http://www.cloudorado.com/ (it may not work without www yet).
The service is something like pricegrabber.com for cloud computing – you specify resources you need for cloud servers and it will present offers from multiple providers.
It is done in GWT + SmartGWT. I’ve chosen this technology, since it allows client side calculations, without network and server delays. Therefore you can use sliders and see how prices change without any delay. There is one side effect though – it is quite big to load. So to minimize the negative effect of loading at start I present a static version (widgets does not work at all), which is replaced with actual interactive version as soon as it loads up. You shouldn’t even notice it, unless you try using sliders or links before it actually boots up. Probably this is a good subject for another article.
Going back to the feedback I have several areas that bothers me, so I would really appreciate if you could take them into account.
1. Usefulness: Would the site be useful for you if you planned to buy cloud server? What should be added, what is irrelevant? Is the missing thing crucial enough to prevent me from going further?
2. Ease of use: Is it simple enough to understand it without explanation?
3. Name: I’m not a native English speaker, so it is difficult for me to judge how a name sounds for natives and if it easy to remember. The other top candidates were cloudcruncher.com and cloudcomparator.com . Huge advantage for cloudorado.com is that there are virtually no results in Google for that. Which would you choose?
4. Business model – I mostly plan to earn on cloud providers’ affiliate programs or charge per click. Which of those you think would be better? Any other ideas?
Obviously I don’t think the service is done now, but hopefully something like alpha would apply. Therefore feedback is really critical at this point and I really appreciate any comments. I hope it will save me some dead ends.
Thank you!
Marcin
38 comments
[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] threadEdit: Ditto for 256.
- where is slicehost? - not working on opera.
At this stage I'm far from covering all IaaS providers. There are at least 50 of them currently. But I'll keep adding new. I'll put slicehost on top then :)
SmartGWT seems to have a bug with sliders for Opera. Something with z-index I think.
* Cloudorado is a "cute" name but a bit of a mouthful to type/remember the spelling of.
* The other name options are a little generic but of the two I think Cloudcruncher.com has the lead.
[Cloudorado sounds more like the place SV telecommuters live. ;)]
In fact there's a whois record for your cloudcruncher.com domain in the first page of results. :)
Disclaimer: IMHO. Not trying to offend anyone. Etc.
Edit: I would also like to say that i find the name excellent. It conveys the point very well, you should not change it.
I like the way the basic mode works and gets straight to the point.
A few points that occur to me, but they're all just cosmetic things..... The slider for linux/windows could be a radio control, it would be more fitting for the options.
You can't tell what you're choosing with the CPU power slider, I'd put marker on the slider such as .25 .5 1 2 etc and label that as '* 1 Xeon E5520 etc'
Why are the bandwidth and subscription hidden in accordions? If it's just to keep the results table from being pushed too low you could recapture that space by removing the text from the dark blue gradient area, the second line is fairly redundant info and the "Cloud Computing Comparison Engine" could happily sit above the top menu almost flush with the top of the page.
When you expand the details for an item in the results list it's very difficult to read. As it is in an expanded element you can afford to get some extra white space in there. Pop a bit more of a margin round the tables, and add a bit of css so the column widths are the same for each result row, which will make it easier to compare details of results.
Edit: By "used values" I mean bandwidth values that where used for calculation. They were to be static. So later I came up with this solution to be somewhere in the middle.
Feature request: something I routinely find myself calculating/re-calculating is which provider will give me the most CPU/RAM/bandwidth/storage per dollar.
For example, I may not care how my individual boxes/instances are configured. It makes no difference to me whether I have one instance with 16GB of RAM or 16 instances each with 1GB of RAM...as long as there is a total of 16GB RAM in my cluster, and I'm paying as little as possible.
This especially applies to bandwidth.
BTW. Check the advanced mode - it has an option to distribute resources - just select "distribute" checkbox. It will find the cheapest option for that - it may then split over multiple servers if it is cheaper. One thing to remember though - it will always try to distribute on servers of the same type. Sometimes it would be better to have N boxes of type X and then one box of another type. I don't have it.
I don't think the basic premise of the interface is very helpful. Having to dial in an exact configuration to get any information is very cumbersome, and requires the user to scan the parameters and take notes to get an idea of what the tradeoffs are.
In particular, the way service providers disappear from the results when a configuration they don't support is entered creates more questions than answers to the user. When I enter a few configurations with no result for Rackspace, I think "why don't you just TELL ME what Rackspace supports."
I know you have many dimensions of data to deal with, so a more complex visualization is difficult, but it will be worth it if you can work it out. I would recommend looking at Edward Tufte's books.
You may also find Tableau software's free web visualization software useful. It solves this basic problem although I have never used it so I can't say if it works well.
Just a quick thought - would dropping a provider down the list + dash instead of price + stating "provider does not support this configuration" instead of server summary. Probably a limiting resource should be also mentioned. Would it make it?
You should do a "Show HN" with that site.
(FWIW I like the layout of the individual review pages but the home page seemed cluttered/hard to follow.)
I'd like to specify a budget amount, and see what the offers are at that price point. The use case is something like "I know what $20 gets me on Linode, how does that compare to $20 at the other providers?"