

Cloudkick (YC W09) Rolls Out Freemium Model For Server Management System - mqt
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/cloudkick-rolls-out-freemium-model-for-server-management-system/

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shrike
It looks like a great service but at that pricing it almost exactly doubles my
hosting cost. I can get "good enough" with cacti, nagios and pingdom. I can
see expensive plans for enterprises moving to the cloud, but for small
founders and ISV's an extra $100 could buy five more Linode instances.

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patio11
Back in the day I was very penny-wise and pound-foolish -- it was practically
my tagline. In some ways I still am. But I've learned about reimplementing
stuff outside my core competencies.

It doesn't matter that $100 or whatever sounds like a lot of money to me, or
that $100 can buy a lot of slices or software or pizza for that matter. What
does matter is that setting up cacti/nagios/etc takes time. That is time where
I could be doing things that actually make money, like fun SEO work or
intellectual-stimulating-as-watching-paint-dry-but-sure-as-heck-profitable
button A/B testing.

A single A/B test which offered a 3% lift _anywhere_ pays for $100 a month,
and for companies or individuals operating above my scale, you have even less
of a bar to waltz over. I also typically don't have to maintain those (gif
files break remarkably seldom in my experience compared to software), where
getting more software running just increases the number of things that can
need tweaking or go wrong next month.

Now, you're almost certainly a better sysadmin than I am, so maybe knocking
together some cacti/nagios scripts is really, really fast for you. But I'm
betting the best use of your time is probably more effective than doing this.

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davidw
That's at least 1200$ every year. With that money, maybe you could pay a
friend to knock together some scripts and not have recurring costs.

Also, do you really spend all day doing A/B tests or do you have 'marginal'
time that you could dedicate to other things? I think we (maybe not you; I'm
speaking in general) make the mistake of saying that since we bill at X
dollars an hour, that our time is worth that. It isn't: you can't fill all
your hours with pay work all the time.

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ynniv
Gah... I just got the email announcing Linode and SMS support, jumped up and
down, visited the site... and found the cheapest plan to be $100/mo.

Sorry guys. I much prefer your service (assuming SMS + Linode), but thats way
to expensive. Pingdom FTW. :(

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mattdennewitz
to be fair, pingdom isn't going to supply you with details about cpu,
bandwidth, disk, memory, etc usage for a multi-node deployment - they'll just
tell you when its down.

i do think the prices are high, and you could certainly go it alone w/ nagios
et al, but cloudkick offers a capable and detailed monitoring infrastructure
that plugs into many outlets out-of-box. thats pretty cool if you ask me.

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ynniv
Yes, I am very excited about the new features, but they've priced themselves
well outside what I'm willing to pay. If the host isn't down, I can ask nagios
for free. If it is down, Pingdom (even the free version) will send me an SMS.
There may be a target market for their price point, but I'm not part of it.

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dfragnito
We are moving out of rightscale and are considering <http://ylastic.com/> for
server management. They seem to be offering the same service for less. Or am I
missing something? (update) I see that cloudclick spans more cloud offerings.
That may justify the increase in price depending on your needs. Since we are
only in Ec2 ylastic makes more sense for us.

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ApolloRising
Just a question but is there any reason why this is better than setting up
cacti to monitor any and all server usage benchmarks?

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revorad
See patio11's comment above - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077400>

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ApolloRising
Thank you for the info

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mattjung
I wonder if it isn't a waste of energy to integrate with 10 different
providers and to keep up with all API changes and being forced to find the
best way to abstract all the different features of the providers into one
interface...

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olefoo
It is if you're having to do it for your own stuff, but if someone else is
making it their job, that's a valuable service so long as it gets you out of
being locked into vendors cloud solutions.

If they are charging on an annual basis less than it would cost to switch your
codebase between any one set of providers, then you're getting a deal.

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tk999
Anybody using rightscale?

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Mc_Big_G
I tried the free developer version of RightScale a year or so ago. RS offers a
slightly different service than CK. With RS, you can create scripts which run
at startup and configure the instance. RS does automatic master/slave DB
server failover, automatic instance creation and load balancing, etc... I'm
not sure how their monitoring tools compare to CK. I wouldn't say they are
direct competitors, and if they are, RS can do quite a bit more.

That said, I really like the CK interface and will give them a try for basic
monitoring.

