

AppHarbor (YC W11) announces pricing - runesoerensen
http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/02/02/announcing-pricing

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solutionyogi
Background: I develop line of business .NET applications on full time basis.

I can not make sense of this pricing page at all. What's a worker? There is no
concept of a worker in .NET world.

Okie, you are saying that a worker is actually a process. Why not call it
worker process? What happens if I have one worker and my application crashes
due to unhandled exception? Do you automatically restart it? How long does it
take to restart? What happens to other client requests while restart is taking
place? As someone who has not used any PAAS in production environment, how do
I decide how many workers do I need? I think it's your job as a service
provider to educate me on how I can move away from my current infrastructure.

Let's look at the Add On Pricing <https://appharbor.com/addons>.

Dedicated SQL Server - Hecto (10GB) - 180$/month.

Shared SQL Server - Yocto plan is free and Nano plan costs money. It's okie to
use cute plan names but why not include the detail that Yocto plan provides
20MB storage and Nano plan provides 10GB storage?

I can't help but link to Patrick's comments about Heroku's pricing (I am
guessing you are taking inspiration from their pricing).

Patrick's original comment when Heroku announced pricing:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577622>

Follow up: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133051>

On a related note, I think you should definitely check out how
<http://phpfog.com> is selling itself. I used to develop web applications in
PHP and when I went to their page on 'How It Works', I understood it right
away.

<https://www.phpfog.com/platform> [And bonus points for being so beautiful.]

Next, I look at their pricing page:

<https://www.phpfog.com/pricing>

Once again, their pricing page lists hardware specs so that I can relate to my
current infrastructure. But if you notice, they let me run maximum of 10 apps
on Silver cloud. So they decided that it only makes sense to run maximum of 10
apps if you have 613MB of memory. I think you should do something similar to
educate people about PAAS. When I decided to try them out, the entire process
to setup a running WordPress installation was seamless and took less than 5
minutes. I was so impressed that I immediately signed up for the silver cloud.
At 30 bucks a month with 10 apps, a WordPress installation on a fully managed
server costs me 3 bucks a month. It can't get cheaper than that. This month I
am going to cancel my slicehost VPS because I frankly don't have any
time/patience/expertise to manage my own server. Thank you very much.

For you guys, I would suggest that you should have some sample applications in
your dashboard which user can install and play with (e.g. NerdDinner
<http://nerddinner.codeplex.com/>). Let them get familiar to what your
offering is before they decide to commit to your platform.

I am going to sign up for AppHarbor and see if it matches up my fantastic
experience with phpfog and give you further feedback later on.

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dm8
I have a suggestion regarding pricing plans naming. These names sound fancy
and unique but miss an important objective. A pricing page is arguably the
most important page (apart from landing page) on your website. And with these
names an average user will feel confused because :- 1\. These are not the
standard names across all the websites. 2\. Lack of documentation around the
details of pricing. 3\. It makes users think about what these plans stand for
(violating basic principle of design).

Simplicity is important as well as useful. Something like - "Basic, Standard,
Premium" gives user some basic idea about plans instantly. And don't forget,
vocabulary plays important role in UX.

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latch
Link to the actual pricing page: <https://appharbor.com/pricing>

There's a considerable lack of documentation around exactly what it is you are
getting. The pricing page has no info, the blog post has just a tiny bit more.

Heroku does a great job of really detailing their infrastructure and having
that map to a dyno. PHPFog uses a different approach and details specs. Both
are more transparent.

I assume a worker is a single thread (much like a dyno), but "Improve the
reliability and responsiveness of your website." isn't nearly enough detail.

~~~
friism
That's great feedback, we'll try to a better job. In the meantime, check out
the "How AppHarbor Works" page for additional details:
<https://appharbor.com/page/how-it-works>

~~~
latch
You know, I saw that page, but what I totally missed was the "Application
Runtime Environment" section. I'm 50/50...I could have been more
thorough...but I bet a lot of people wouldn't realize there are two links
there...

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philjones88
I have been using AppHarbor for about 5 months now, having deployed 2 very
different applications to it.

The first is my company website which admittedly doesn't get a whole load of
traffic and survives completely on their free instance, free 20mb database and
a custom domain name.

The second is a client's website with 2 instances, a 10GB database and several
other addons.

With my first, I feel the new pricing puts me off, the site is low traffic and
doesn't need a lot of resources to run. I could pay the new $10 per month for
a custom domain name or I could just stick the site on a cheap shared hosting
package, I use a provider that charges me $65 per year for 20+ domain names on
it. Although I do get easier deployment, building etc with AppHarbor its not a
compelling story as I don't change my company site that much to justify it.

With my second website, I found it much easier as the client want to move fast
and AppHarbor's build and seamless deploy really helped as the client could
refresh the page and see the changes. AppHarbor really works well with this
client and he has come to appreciate that although it is more expensive than
say shared or VPS that the uptime is better and it costs him less money as I
don't bother charging for 2 minute changes that I can do quickly and push to
AppHarbor.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about these pricing changes, especially as I
started looking at what Heroku is offering. I plan to play around over the
weekend with NancyFX, Mono and Heroku. Perhaps that combination would work
well with my smaller clients.

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siganakis
I have been using AppHarbor for the past few months and have been very
impressed.

The new pricing seems reasonable, but I would like to know exactly what a
"worker" is (e.g. is it a worker process, a thread, or a server?).

All in all, its possible to get up and running with a < 10GB shared SQL Server
instance running a site with your own domain for $20/month. Seems like a
pretty good deal to me.

~~~
runesoerensen
Good to hear - check out my answer to latch
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3545608>).

AppHarbor is a multitenant platform and we're running multiple application on
each application server. A worker is an actual worker process that is limited
in terms of the amount of resources it can consume.

We'll add a more detailed explanation of what a worker actually is.

~~~
siganakis
Does that mean that if I have 2 workers that I can be certain that they are on
different logical machines in the event of a machine failure? Or may my 2
workers actually be on the same machine?

~~~
troethom
2 workers will always be on two different machines. We're probably going to
reuse machines when you scale to more than that and increase process limits
instead (this could yield better performance as you need to populate fewer
local cache etc.)

------
Pythondj
<rant> Why (when you could deploy your own PaaS layer on just about any Cloud
hosting provider from Amazon to Rackspace on any hyper-visor) are people still
insisting on paying public PaaS vendors to re-sell them computing hours and
lock them into their proprietary platforms - when will people wake up and see
that Heroku, AppHarbor, and all the rest are just locking you in and getting
your addicted to services! Just once, test out deploying cloud foundry or
better yet deploy activestate's stackato (built on cloud foundry) onto the
cloud hosting provider and run your own private PaaS
<http://community.activestate.com/stackato> </rant>

------
highace
Honest question: why would I use this over a Windows rackspace instance
costing about the same per month?

~~~
troethom
You get more than just the instance. We take care of keeping the servers
alive, patching them and such. We also load-balance your traffic, which is
usually something you have to add if you're picking another provider. Finally,
there's what people like most about AppHarbor, the ability to push code to
Bitbucket or GitHub and have it build and deploy, but only if everything
checks out. Rackspace is closer to the infrastructure layer. Some prefer that,
but I bet most will prefer the convenience of a platform.

~~~
highace
Great, thanks for the reply. I will certainly give it a go.

