The huge jump from $0/mo to $100/mo makes this a non-starter for me, and I suspect I'm not the only one. I think these pricing points are a mistake; as someone very interested in this market it'll be interested to see if I'm right or not.
I'll try to explain:
I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and build isn't proven yet.
But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned hard to argument with free!
But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump right to $100/mo.
I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or lifestyle businesses away.
So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left?
My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go the way of the dodo.
[Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page. Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.]
PS: Oh yeah, one other thing:
Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone who doesn't get that.
Thanks Shykes! I've been building my app on your service and have become hooked. I showed your tour video to my office today and they were all very intrigued. Congratulations on the launch.
Password reset form? Created an account but it won't let me log in. Maybe a messed up the password cut and paste from my password database.
Second, no ssl for the login form? Is this coming soon?
Third, I occasionally would get redirected to a subdomain http://c959ac0b.dotcloud.com which doesn't seem to have the same session cookie as the www domain.
This is super minor and stupid, but Chrome has a super stupid crossed-out https protocol warning thing and it looks like it's due to your having pulled down the un-SSL'ed jquery from google. It's an easy fix to pull down the SSL'ed version instead [1]
[1] it affects caching and stuff, iirc, but I also think that cache hits are pretty low as it stands (citation missing, but needed, obviously)
Private Beta user here. I'll just preface this by saying that DotCloud has been the smoothest and easiest service I've used in the Heroku-umbrella of products.
That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant an account this big).
On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of) from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well. They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single site total.
TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest possible tier.
What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each:
The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new service has one service process associated with it; additional service processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan, additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional service processes are priced at $40 / month.
A service represents a given application or database, such as PHP, Ruby or MySQL. For example, if your plan includes 2 services, you can run an instance of Python and an instance of MySQL. If you wanted to use an additional runtime, such as PHP, you would need an additional service.
Okay, so I pay $99 for 4 of these "services".
Does a service equate to one UNIX process of my application running in a sandbox on one of your servers? How are resources allocated on the (presumably) shared host?
How much RAM does my service get?
And then there's this, which I hope is a typo:
Database services scale differently [...] With the Pro plan, database services have 10 GB of disk, and 300 MB of RAM. [...] Additional database capacity can be added to the Pro or Enterprise plans, at $1 / MB of RAM / month, and $1 / GB of disk / month.
One second. 300MB Ram for a database?
And upgrading to a still microscopic 1GB of Ram will cost me $700/mo?
Yes, ram cost is in fact a typo - actual price is 10x lower. Sorry about that.
When you push your application to dotCloud, it's broken down into services. For example python frontend, nodejs worker, mysql: that's 3 services.
Each service starts with a certain amount of capacity. Those are soft limits: you get a guaranteed minimum, but you'll probably get more, most of the time. It's most definitely not like shared hosting in that regard.
Each service can then be scaled individually, by allocating more concurrent processes, ram or disk. Specific costs are listed in the FAQ.
My site was down for 5 hours on Dotcloud yesterday because of a wildcard alias issue (effectively my cname stopped working).
I e-mailed support and heard nothing until I tweeted referencing their twitter handle, then got a response asking that I file an email ticket.
In the meantime, the site came back. This is just a fun toy site, so not a real business, but still.
Dotcloud has been easy to use and deployments are nice and easy, but I can't justify spending money on a company who really really needs to invest on a support infrastructure.
1) This was completely unacceptable on our part. I lose my temper maybe once a year, and yesterday I did precisely because of your ordeal.
2) Ironically, this happened precisely because we are investing heavily in our support infrastructure. As we transition from one overloaded senior engineer to a full-time support team + every engineer in the company in rotations, these kinds of quirks are bound to happen until we iron out the new process.
In short: - we're incredibly sorry. - we care enormously about support. - and what happened to you is very rare.
There's a very big pricing gap between the free and pro ($99/month) service. This may be difficult for smaller startups.
However, there are "free services
for open source hackers, students, startups and non-profits" if you contact them. See the Pricing FAQ page: https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/
If they are really generous towards students and make this sexy stacks available available at lower price, it will mean a world to us. Course/research projects are done in such short time that we sacrifice kick ass features in order to do away with the mess of setting up these services. Can't imagine the possibilities a inter-school competition with such a stack ...
Glad I didn't invest too much time in playing around with DotCloud. I can certainly see the justified expense when an organization is footing the bill, but for powering freelance projects, it's not entirely reasonable.
I think they're not targeting freelancers as much as larger companies. They're looking for a more "serious" crowd that also doesn't do systems administration. They offer a little more simplicity than managing full VPS solutions, but that costs more up front.
- first time I went to the site I got a nginx 404 message.
- In the browser (Chrome for example) the https in the address bar is shown as "insecure" because it has non-https components, looks like changing the http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js call to https will fix this.
- The "See the Full List >" link on the front page doesn't take me to a list of supported components but the "Platform Overview" page in the documentation.
Lack of custom domains on the Free is really unfortunate. People like to see their sites live on a real domain before investing the 1200 a year in hosting.
I think you need to put a smaller tier 25, 50, 100 and then ramp up from there if you want to get some of the early startup market.
At our startup (kind of a dotcloud specialized for server-side JavaScript) we offer custom domains support [1] starting at $29.95/month, but in general we found out that people take out the time to try the product and the user experience on the free plan before putting any real money into the service.
Maybe it's a behaviour specific for this audience (early adopters in this market are more likely to be individual or startup programmers rather than typical hosting clients, and the technology is relatively new which makes the value proposition to be hard to grasp without a hands-on experience).
I have to say, I'm not sure what the benefit of this service is. I understand where you're trying to positon yourselves (a "Heroku for eveything"), but to me that just doesn't work.
If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure, I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none.
If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services, and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku + RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be comfortable just running things myself on AWS.
About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo, etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just using bare-metal AWS, either.
I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service providers for a "jack of all trades".
EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP, Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby, Redis, CloudDB, others).
Wow, this pricing is actually more expensive than I had hoped for. While the one app I am running at the moment requires just two services, but it does use a custom domain, and $99 a month for something that doesn't make me money (yet, hopefully). I love the idea of Dotcloud, and really do want to continue using it, but would love for them to introduce a tier between free and the $99.
I am by no means suggesting that everything should be available for free, I am more than willing to pay my fair share.
I'm glad to see free-tiers becoming commonplace. There's enough barrier to entry for people to learn these new cloud platforms as it is. And once you're hooked, you're hooked.
I have been a happy dotcloud beta user for a month. As a founder of a small start-up outsourcing the entire sysadmin work is a great advantage and .the support on the IRC has been very valuable. The pricing seems a little steep but I would think that the time saved on doing sysadmin is a great value and would be decent trade-off for most start-ups.
Though I do wish that they would beef up their support staff so that the issues are resolved faster than they are now.
I would recommend something between Free and Pro, If I were about to launch a startup I won't pay $100 a month at the beginning. A programming language, a database and a custom domain are the basics, this "combo" needs to be an option.
With the free account we could test the platform and develop, with the "startup account" we can launch our product, with a little success we take an upgrade to pro for cache, etc.
Who should bear the risk for your startup - DotCloud or yourself? If you're creating a product you believe in, $100 (or more for that matter) should by no mean be out of reach - no matter if you're bootstrapping or looking to raise funding. In case you compare it to a cheap VPS, well, you get what you pay for - and you'll need to do the ops yourself, which is time you should rather spend building your business.
I was kind of impressed with dotcloud beta, its really simple to mix and match databases and deploy them. But I guess I can't afford $100/mo for hosting my kind of experimental apps. I was expecting a usage based pricing scheme similar to Amazon or ep.io. You guys really need to have some intermediate plans. Its a great product, by the way!
Make sure you remove the last dot "." on the api-key.
as copy/paste yield to "error: Authorization rejected" and one shall go and manually edit ~/.dotcloud/dotcloud.conf in order to get back in business
One thing that seems to be missing: how many different apps can you deploy under each level? Do you count the services per-app? If I want to deploy 10 separate python apps, would I have to use the enterprise level?
It would be cool to see some set of Fabric or other scripts come together which offer some of the capabilities DotCloud is providing but that you can use on your own infrastructure or host.
[+] [-] jacobian|14 years ago|reply
I'll try to explain:
I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and build isn't proven yet.
But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned hard to argument with free!
But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump right to $100/mo.
I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or lifestyle businesses away.
So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left?
My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go the way of the dodo.
[Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page. Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.]
PS: Oh yeah, one other thing:
Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone who doesn't get that.
[+] [-] shykes|14 years ago|reply
1) Every URL on the platform gets piggyback ssl by default - no add-on necessary. That includes the free tier.
2) A pro account gets you unlimited SSL on your domain, regardless of how many apps you run. Nobody else does that.
We'll make that clearer in the pricing page.
[+] [-] ethank|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shykes|14 years ago|reply
We'd rather build high-quality stuff, priced fairly, and give some of it away, than race to the bottom along with everybody else.
[+] [-] aaronblohowiak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ondrae|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] singlow|14 years ago|reply
Password reset form? Created an account but it won't let me log in. Maybe a messed up the password cut and paste from my password database.
Second, no ssl for the login form? Is this coming soon?
Third, I occasionally would get redirected to a subdomain http://c959ac0b.dotcloud.com which doesn't seem to have the same session cookie as the www domain.
[+] [-] alexgartrell|14 years ago|reply
[1] it affects caching and stuff, iirc, but I also think that cache hits are pretty low as it stands (citation missing, but needed, obviously)
[+] [-] jmcqk6|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dongsheng|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pewpewarrows|14 years ago|reply
That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant an account this big).
On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of) from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well. They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single site total.
TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest possible tier.
[+] [-] stephth|14 years ago|reply
What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each:
The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new service has one service process associated with it; additional service processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan, additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional service processes are priced at $40 / month.
[1] http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/
[+] [-] moe|14 years ago|reply
A service represents a given application or database, such as PHP, Ruby or MySQL. For example, if your plan includes 2 services, you can run an instance of Python and an instance of MySQL. If you wanted to use an additional runtime, such as PHP, you would need an additional service.
Okay, so I pay $99 for 4 of these "services". Does a service equate to one UNIX process of my application running in a sandbox on one of your servers? How are resources allocated on the (presumably) shared host? How much RAM does my service get?
And then there's this, which I hope is a typo:
Database services scale differently [...] With the Pro plan, database services have 10 GB of disk, and 300 MB of RAM. [...] Additional database capacity can be added to the Pro or Enterprise plans, at $1 / MB of RAM / month, and $1 / GB of disk / month.
One second. 300MB Ram for a database? And upgrading to a still microscopic 1GB of Ram will cost me $700/mo?
And 1TB of disk will cost me $1000/mo?
Seriously?
[+] [-] shykes|14 years ago|reply
When you push your application to dotCloud, it's broken down into services. For example python frontend, nodejs worker, mysql: that's 3 services.
Each service starts with a certain amount of capacity. Those are soft limits: you get a guaranteed minimum, but you'll probably get more, most of the time. It's most definitely not like shared hosting in that regard.
Each service can then be scaled individually, by allocating more concurrent processes, ram or disk. Specific costs are listed in the FAQ.
Hope that helps.
[+] [-] ethank|14 years ago|reply
My site was down for 5 hours on Dotcloud yesterday because of a wildcard alias issue (effectively my cname stopped working).
I e-mailed support and heard nothing until I tweeted referencing their twitter handle, then got a response asking that I file an email ticket.
In the meantime, the site came back. This is just a fun toy site, so not a real business, but still.
Dotcloud has been easy to use and deployments are nice and easy, but I can't justify spending money on a company who really really needs to invest on a support infrastructure.
[+] [-] shykes|14 years ago|reply
1) This was completely unacceptable on our part. I lose my temper maybe once a year, and yesterday I did precisely because of your ordeal.
2) Ironically, this happened precisely because we are investing heavily in our support infrastructure. As we transition from one overloaded senior engineer to a full-time support team + every engineer in the company in rotations, these kinds of quirks are bound to happen until we iron out the new process.
In short: - we're incredibly sorry. - we care enormously about support. - and what happened to you is very rare.
[+] [-] mikexstudios|14 years ago|reply
However, there are "free services for open source hackers, students, startups and non-profits" if you contact them. See the Pricing FAQ page: https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/
[+] [-] tathagatadg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicksergeant|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Periodic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fduran|14 years ago|reply
- first time I went to the site I got a nginx 404 message.
- In the browser (Chrome for example) the https in the address bar is shown as "insecure" because it has non-https components, looks like changing the http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js call to https will fix this.
- The "See the Full List >" link on the front page doesn't take me to a list of supported components but the "Platform Overview" page in the documentation.
[+] [-] ApolloRising|14 years ago|reply
I think you need to put a smaller tier 25, 50, 100 and then ramp up from there if you want to get some of the early startup market.
[+] [-] vladd|14 years ago|reply
Maybe it's a behaviour specific for this audience (early adopters in this market are more likely to be individual or startup programmers rather than typical hosting clients, and the technology is relatively new which makes the value proposition to be hard to grasp without a hands-on experience).
[1] https://secure.erbix.com/pricing
[+] [-] silverlight|14 years ago|reply
If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure, I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none.
If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services, and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku + RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be comfortable just running things myself on AWS.
About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo, etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just using bare-metal AWS, either.
I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service providers for a "jack of all trades".
EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP, Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby, Redis, CloudDB, others).
[+] [-] calloc|14 years ago|reply
I am by no means suggesting that everything should be available for free, I am more than willing to pay my fair share.
[+] [-] dstein|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prayag|14 years ago|reply
Though I do wish that they would beef up their support staff so that the issues are resolved faster than they are now.
[+] [-] prayag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vyrotek|14 years ago|reply
ANY stack? How about .Net? :)
[+] [-] benologist|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shykes|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alvivar|14 years ago|reply
With the free account we could test the platform and develop, with the "startup account" we can launch our product, with a little success we take an upgrade to pro for cache, etc.
[+] [-] troethom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewphiong|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vivekn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzury|14 years ago|reply
Make sure you remove the last dot "." on the api-key. as copy/paste yield to "error: Authorization rejected" and one shall go and manually edit ~/.dotcloud/dotcloud.conf in order to get back in business
[+] [-] lost-theory|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|14 years ago|reply