
Ask HN: How to market large scale open source hosting? - telmich
TL;DR How to market www.datacenterlight.ch non intrusively to Open Source hackers?<p>Hello,<p>here is Nico, FOSS hacker and CEO of ungleich.ch, a small Swiss Open Source company.<p>We have the Swiss wide unique possibility to offer <i>really</i> affordable VM hosting in the midst of the mountains of Switzerland, because we can host our servers in old factory halls.<p>Thus we save a lot of energy and money and want to give this price advantage to our customers.<p>We love that our software stack is 100% open source, running with locally produced water power and omitting active cooling (because it is cold enough).<p>That said, with our low margin want to address a substantial amount of customers and mainly those who love Open Source like we do.<p>Running a browser with adblocker myself and hating unsolicited advertising, blinky gifs, etc. I wonder about your opinion:<p>How do you think we should market our product?
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boulos
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

You should probably redo this as a Show HN. In that spirit, some feedback on
your landing page:

\- People have lots of reasons behind why they choose an infrastructure
provider. Yours seems mostly "goodwill" (both from an environmental and OSS
standpoint). Call that out in a "Why Datacenter Light?" Page or section.

\- You mention (both here and on the landing page) your open-source stack. Can
you say more? Is it KVM based? Do you use Kubernetes? The HN crowd and your
target audience (OSS people looking for a box in Switzerland) would appreciate
it. A basic set of bullet points would go a long way (and/or a Git repo!).

\- Moreover an engineering blog on how you stood this up would likely get lots
of interest from HN. How'd you find this factory? Why'd you choose whatever
bits you did for a hypervisor? Enough of that content spreads around and
you're suddenly looking at customers.

\- Most directly, you presumably think of yourself as an alternative to VPS
providers and Digital Ocean in particular. I'll caution that DO has had to
gain "real cloud provider" services like load balancing, object storage,
remote block storage and so on. Which of those do you (plan to) offer?

\- While I don't think it's the most important thing you probably want a
different name for this offering. Datacenter Light is fairly generic thing
(and non-Swiss-German speakers won't know what your umbrella company name
means, but you needn't change that).

\- Finally, sponsor small events that most directly fit your target audience.
My _assumption_ is that you are starting this in Switzerland not only because
you live there but because you believe in the current security climate that
other people want to host there. There are lots of great ways to spend $500 to
host a beer gathering at an important conference and turn that into interest
and word of mouth.

Best of luck!

~~~
telmich
Oh and I forgot to name the most important tool that we use: emacs

~~~
anotherkamila
_You_ use emacs, you octopus, not me!!!

Um, I don't want to go here.

(Disclaimer: He's my boss, so I am allowed to make fun of him and say that I
don't use emacs. I hope.)

~~~
telmich
I think we should have an emacs workshop in the near future - maybe even with
the help of preek ;-)

~~~
preek
Count me in^^

