It's interesting that they focus on WordPress. A custom WordPress install could potentially have several requests that make up a given page. Wordpress isn't really designed with reducing the requests in mind.
Wordpress is getting increasingly better at keeping requests lower. And it's all up to a user how they optimise; they can get it down to just a couple of requests if they wish.
That seems a little weird. Let me put this in context, if I host my server on digitalocean for $5 a month or what ever, and let's say I have 1,000 visitors a day, which is rather small for a blog. And let's say I have a css file, js file, 10 images, and a website. That's 13 http requests assuming that nothing is cached. That translates to 390,000 requests a month (assuming 30 days), which is 90,000 over your 300,000 request limit. So for $50 a month I can't even do what my $5 a month server at digitalocean (and a free server at heroku if we want to compare it) can easily do?
It's all relative. We save you time, and make sure your service is always up. We work with you through any pain points you have. If your server goes down, and you lose an hour of your time. You've already lost that difference.
You also assume nothing is cached, whereas only if those were all uniques would that be likely. Which is generally unlikely.
Our price is based around quality. Both the fact that we grow with you, and the fact that we strive to make every task you need to do, ridiculously easy.
Hah, that's silly. If you wanted me to concentrate on coding,you'd help me with automated deployment, automated backup of my postgres db every night (even if it reaches 2 TB+ in space), etc, etc. Your solution isn't geared towards developers at all.
There's a wide variety of skills and wants from developers. The fact is; we have a user base of developers who do want us. And I personally, as a developer want us.
We have git automated deployment being released this week.
And if your database is 2TBs, you want an Enterprise Solution.
You can currently snapshot your projects, in the same manner we do for failovers.
But we'll definitely keep your opinion in mind, thank you.
Depending on the website 13 requests is kind of small, 20-30 requests for a regular page probably more likely with maybe 3 or 4 that can be cached on an unoptimized site and the rest being image assets for that particular page and so on.
So with 300,000 I get something like 10,000-15,000 pageviews which is pretty much nothing.
What makes the "request" metric even more confusing is they say "Unlimited Data Transfer". Which means absolutely NOTHING if the # of requests is limited.
Yes. However, it's not a VPS service. The file system is automatically managed by Jumpstarter and upgraded without downtime. The idea of no root access is not to limit you, but because you shouldn't have to worry about administration - we handle it all.
You never have to worry about if other people are being resource intensive for one major reason. And if you got Hacker News'd, rather than punishing you and everyone else – we'd instead give you more resources to deal with it :)
We won't be charging people extra or forcing them to change their plan if you have a sudden influx of visits from Hacker News or another site. We will consider that a temporary traffic spike and we will be happy that you are in the spotlight rather than trying to charge you more! The plans are based on your usual monthly usage, so if you continued to get the same number of requests monthly, we would talk to you at that point about upgrading.
In other words, something akin to 95th percentile billing? Odd that you didn't use terms like that in the response. Most experienced hosts or ISPs would.
We have also got a brand new wiki with lots of information, and we'll be continuing to add a lot more to it over the next few weeks: https://github.com/jumpstarter-io/help/wiki
Suggestion more than question. I like your Getting Started wiki page, but it would be good [for me] to break those down into individual pages with either screenshots or replicated HTML5 to show each step of the experience. One quick Hello World example on your tour would help me grok what your product actually offers (or how I would use it) better.
Our wiki is brand new this week, so I am glad you like it! If you haven't seen already, you can click on the 'see it in action' button to see a gif that walks you through lots of the setup steps. We'll definitely think about your suggestion for the tour page though. Thanks for the feedback :)
The only metric used by them 'request' is not explained neither through the website nor FAQ found on Github! Good luck with taht. And i really hope it does not mean, what it means. If so it's darn expensive. perhaps more than MT.
on a sidenote, you have entered pretty much competitive market with tons of 'major players'. Deep down in our hearts we all know, what 'quality hosting mean'. They are all the same. some of them suck much other less. They all have down time. It's only up to you pay more or less for having almost same service from any of them. You are only good for them as long as, you have steady traffic than spikey ;)
That has indeed been the way for many years and a valid worry. And yet, we're changing it. A lot of hosting companies are white labelled without any major differences.
Our tech was completely written from the ground up to combat this. As said in the marketing materials; if you have a spike, we handle it fine. We've done intensive testing to make sure that being linked to from Hacker News, or anywhere else that gives you a big influx of traffic, won't make your server go down.
We wrote this because we too were tired of the landscape, and we wanted people like ourselves not to have to suffer with this anymore.
i am currently using $20/mo dreampress you know whom. how does it compare to it? I had HN spike, and website (wordpress) was pretty much calm. they say it beats $500/mo wordpress.com VIP and they are a reputable webhost. whom i am using since 2007
So your website and this comment seem to be highlighting automatic scaling as the major advantage of the system. But I'm not really getting why you think it is worth highlighting. It almost seems like the opposite, with scalability being the weak point.
As far as I can see, your architecture is explicitly limited to a single instance of each app at a time, so there is almost no scope for scaling at all in the first place. The only reason it would probably not be an issue in practice is that the request limits are absurdly low. The story is further weakened by no mention anywhere of what happens when the paid for quota is exceeded -- this seems like a key detail that's completely glossed over.
I can see the point of selling a system like this to less technical users based on an ease of use or the conceptual simplicity of an application as a filesystem. Even if the suggested advantages, such as no need for deploying code and easy copy-paste for starting new projects, make me shudder a bit. But selling on scalability just makes no sense, it almost comes across as snake oil.
We don't do horizontal scaling, correct. We have some great advantages of not doing that. We isolate your project, and give it as many resources as it needs.
The largest instance we can put you on is equivalent to 100 Heroku dynamos for instance. And we plan on growing that farther.
I have a blog on a popular host, and when I got hit by Hacker News my server fell over. Doing so caused me to lose a lot of the reads and garner plenty of complaints from here. It can be a total pain, and every time my posts appear on HN, I get scared inside if the project isn't on HN.
As for simplicity; it's not just the filesystem. The panel itself is easy to use, and we're continually adding more relevant features to help people just focus on staying in flow and working on their code.
If we can save devs any time, we've won. And I think we save them a lot of time.
We won't hinder your website. We'll email you at 80% and if it's a one off spike, then we'll let you go over fine. If it's a monthly thing, then we'll chat to you and ask you to upgrade :)
I'm very interested in this. Do you guys support Rails 4, PostgreSQL? There are a few icons there in the landing page but no tooltips or anything to let me know what they are.
I want something in between DigitalOcean (barebones) and Heroku (configures everything but doesn't let you customize anything either) - this seems like a perfect fit.
43 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 91.7 ms ] threadhttp://jumpstarter.io/
"Pricing Tour Support Sign up Login"
No links. View source code shows html though.
This is on ffox latest and safari latest.
What counts as a request? A hit to any asset? A connection/
It's interesting that they focus on WordPress. A custom WordPress install could potentially have several requests that make up a given page. Wordpress isn't really designed with reducing the requests in mind.
Wordpress is getting increasingly better at keeping requests lower. And it's all up to a user how they optimise; they can get it down to just a couple of requests if they wish.
You may want to rethink that.
You also assume nothing is cached, whereas only if those were all uniques would that be likely. Which is generally unlikely.
Our price is based around quality. Both the fact that we grow with you, and the fact that we strive to make every task you need to do, ridiculously easy.
We have git automated deployment being released this week. And if your database is 2TBs, you want an Enterprise Solution.
You can currently snapshot your projects, in the same manner we do for failovers.
But we'll definitely keep your opinion in mind, thank you.
So with 300,000 I get something like 10,000-15,000 pageviews which is pretty much nothing.
You never have to worry about if other people are being resource intensive for one major reason. And if you got Hacker News'd, rather than punishing you and everyone else – we'd instead give you more resources to deal with it :)
It's like you guys don't know anything about normal website traffic volumes, which isn't a good sign for a host.
Where could I find more details/inspiration for your filesystem? It's great to see innovation in that area!
You can take a look at our technical tour page which has some information on it: http://jumpstarter.io/technical
We have also got a brand new wiki with lots of information, and we'll be continuing to add a lot more to it over the next few weeks: https://github.com/jumpstarter-io/help/wiki
Thanks for your feedback.
on a sidenote, you have entered pretty much competitive market with tons of 'major players'. Deep down in our hearts we all know, what 'quality hosting mean'. They are all the same. some of them suck much other less. They all have down time. It's only up to you pay more or less for having almost same service from any of them. You are only good for them as long as, you have steady traffic than spikey ;)
Our tech was completely written from the ground up to combat this. As said in the marketing materials; if you have a spike, we handle it fine. We've done intensive testing to make sure that being linked to from Hacker News, or anywhere else that gives you a big influx of traffic, won't make your server go down.
We wrote this because we too were tired of the landscape, and we wanted people like ourselves not to have to suffer with this anymore.
As far as I can see, your architecture is explicitly limited to a single instance of each app at a time, so there is almost no scope for scaling at all in the first place. The only reason it would probably not be an issue in practice is that the request limits are absurdly low. The story is further weakened by no mention anywhere of what happens when the paid for quota is exceeded -- this seems like a key detail that's completely glossed over.
I can see the point of selling a system like this to less technical users based on an ease of use or the conceptual simplicity of an application as a filesystem. Even if the suggested advantages, such as no need for deploying code and easy copy-paste for starting new projects, make me shudder a bit. But selling on scalability just makes no sense, it almost comes across as snake oil.
The largest instance we can put you on is equivalent to 100 Heroku dynamos for instance. And we plan on growing that farther.
I have a blog on a popular host, and when I got hit by Hacker News my server fell over. Doing so caused me to lose a lot of the reads and garner plenty of complaints from here. It can be a total pain, and every time my posts appear on HN, I get scared inside if the project isn't on HN.
As for simplicity; it's not just the filesystem. The panel itself is easy to use, and we're continually adding more relevant features to help people just focus on staying in flow and working on their code.
If we can save devs any time, we've won. And I think we save them a lot of time.
I want something in between DigitalOcean (barebones) and Heroku (configures everything but doesn't let you customize anything either) - this seems like a perfect fit.
We don't support Rails and PostgreSQL quite yet, but they are both in our future plans, so we should have support for them soon.
You can also make requests on our wiki for frameworks you would like us to support: https://github.com/jumpstarter-io/help/issues