
Jumpstarter launches “next-gen hosting”, promising sub-second server spin-up - ciaranoleary
http://gigaom.com/2014/03/05/jumpstarter-launches-next-gen-hosting-platform-promising-sub-second-server-spin-up/
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sergiotapia
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.

~~~
laurasanders
Hi! Thanks for your interest.

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](https://github.com/jumpstarter-io/help/issues)

~~~
zachinglis
I personally want Rails and PostgreSQL too. We've talked about it a lot and
its definitely something we're keen on implementing :)

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laurasanders
Hi! Laura from Jumpstarter here. :) Hoping to answer any questions.

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peterwwillis
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.

~~~
laurasanders
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 :)

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AznHisoka
"300,000 requests per month"

What counts as a request? A hit to any asset? A connection/

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TruthSHIFT
I'd like to know that as well.

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.

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laurasanders
A request is a http request.

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.

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dubcanada
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?

You may want to rethink that.

~~~
laurasanders
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.

~~~
catinsocks
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.

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AznHisoka
What makes the "request" metric even more confusing is they say "Unlimited
Data Transfer". Which means absolutely NOTHING if the # of requests is
limited.

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frakkingcylons
Couldn't find a link to their site in the article:

[http://jumpstarter.io/](http://jumpstarter.io/)

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laurasanders
Thank you!

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larrys
On that page all I'm getting is text:

"Pricing Tour Support Sign up Login"

No links. View source code shows html though.

This is on ffox latest and safari latest.

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zachinglis
Apologies for that. I'm going to put my hand up and say I made a mistake but
it's all back now :)

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dav-
The free development plan is pretty neat, but other than that it just seems
like another shared PHP host.

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laurasanders
Far from it.

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 :)

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mattmanser
If someone got Hacker News'd they'd immediately owe you $799 by the look of
those prices.

It's like you guys don't know anything about normal website traffic volumes,
which isn't a good sign for a host.

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laurasanders
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.

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deelowe
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.

~~~
laurasanders
We like to talk in plain English and just explain what we mean rather than
using jargon terms that everyone might not understand.

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frade33
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.

~~~
laurasanders
We do need to add it to the website, and to our brand new Github FAQ we're in
the process of building. But a request is a http request. :)

Thanks for your feedback.

~~~
frade33
yeah I am aware of it, but my mom does not ;)

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 ;)

~~~
laurasanders
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.

~~~
jsnell
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.

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zachinglis
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.

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nwh
Not actually a server that's spinning up though is it?

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DieBuche
You seem to get a locked down VPS. Looks like a Debian distribution, but no
root access, no installing packages.

~~~
laurasanders
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.

