
Hello Hacker News - zachinglis
http://jumpstarter.io/hackernews.html
======
drdaeman
> favorite frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal

 _Cough_

> instead of spending between 30 minutes to 12 hours on it like you are doing
> right now

I'd say, half an hour is awfully a lot for even for a manual provisioning with
`apt-get install wordpress` or `tar xvzf wordpress*.tar`.

~~~
zachinglis
Right. But most developers aren't server admins and don't want to be.

I press a few buttons and a server is up and ready! :)

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drdaeman
Right. And I meant, manual provisioning as the "worst" case, but even that
shouldn't take 30 minutes.

I vaguely remember LAMP VPS hostings from years ago, and I believe they mostly
had 1-click installs for popular software. Here is a random video I've Googled
up:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA)
(2009), showing installing Wordpress from Plesk. Installation took 8 minutes
even with verbose explanations for every step. How your service is different?

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zachinglis
Of course. But 1 minute is better than 30, right?

And then you have to maintain it.

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danso
I'm sorry but if you're a cloud service and you have specifically targeted a
static HTML page to Hacker News, _even to the point of where the title is
"Hello Hacker News"_, you should do everything in your power, even if it means
creating a special S3 bucket, to make sure it does not 404.

The regular homepage still seems to work (with missing assets)...but not to
sound too cranky, but it was irritating to see the claim of "10+ FRAMEWORKS"
and _not see the list anywhere on the site_. The closest I saw to a list of
these "10+ FRAMEWORKS" is waiting for the banner _animation_ to cycle through
all the PHP frameworks it supports ( _" Jumpstarter is an addictively fast and
easy way to work with web frameworks like [wait for framework's name to fade
in]"_)

I even clicked all the links I could find. "About" goes to the staff mugshots,
"Help" goes to a support center, and the Blog link goes nowhere.

C'mon...

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zachinglis
I'm going to stick my hand up and say "My fault." We're updating the website a
lot right now and it takes a little for Cloudfare to repropogate everything.

About – The people are the about. We could write a story about who we are and
what we do - I agree. But that's not the most important task any of us could
have done. Help going to the support center is standard. Blog is being
removed.

Appreciate the feedback though :)

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danso
Sorry, to be clear, I clicked on those links to find the 10 frameworks and any
other kind of information about it as a product. Each of those links could
conceivably be a place for such information

~~~
yaddayadda
Agreed. A simple list was wanted, but not found. Something as simple as the
following on any of the pages:

Wordpress

Drupal

Joomla

CodeIgniter

Symfony

CakePHP

Laravel

Yii

Angular

Magento

~~~
zachinglis
We've put the list up on the homepage now :)

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yaddayadda
Thank you.

Although I'm now confused. The list in the animation at the top is: Wordpress,
Drupal, Joomla, CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP, Laravel, Yii, Angular, Magento

While the subsequent list is: Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, CodeIgniter,
CakePHP, OpenCart, Joomla, Concrete5, Kohana, phpBB, Symfony

So are Laravel, Yii, Angular, OpenCart, Concrete5, Kohana, and phpBB up and
running, coming soon, or just possibilities?

And with the, "(Also vanilla HTML and PHP/MySQL)." bit, does that mean someone
could also run something like MediaWiki, just without Jumpstarter _flow_?

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zachinglis
They'll still have Jumpstarter flow – they just won't get the 1-Click ability
and it won't be customised for that particular framework.

Each framework we offer generally comes with a customised stack in one way or
another. :)

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elmertoft
Jumpstarter is the kind of product that just leaves people in awe. I've shown
it both to developer friends and to my girlfriend and the reaction has always
been the same: "How can I get an invite?".

It's so nice that you're finally in Beta and that you get to show the world
what you've been working on for so long. Congrats guys!

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tsmith
I was keen to understand how it works and what this "flow" thing is, as the
technical premise is really quite interesting. So I click on the video... and
start hearing the xylophone... and say "uh oh".

Folks, I have good feelings about good tools, but I don't get them from
watching videos of people talking about how they get good feelings from their
tools. The promotional video has obvious high production values but lacks any
description of what "flow" is/does. It is the 2010s hipster equivalent of
zombo.com.

Tell me what it is, what it compares to, how it's different/new/novel. Putting
it politely, I place very low value in how it makes some random people "feel"
or what sound effects it causes them to emit, and the fact that that comprises
the sole content of the video makes the whole thing suspect.

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zachinglis
The idea is firstly to take the pain out of hosting, rethink a lot of things
(how people collaborate, and use it - think forking and merging like Git.

The idea is to help be people's tech partner as they innovate and create,
taking some of the pain away and giving them more time.

I hope I explained it better? :)

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yajoe
As a dev, completely get the need. Yes, most of my day-to-day job is making a
small change or reproducing a bug locally, testing, and then deploying.
Setting up that loop has been harder than I want to admit and is the reason I
know maven, ant, chef AND puppet, Jenkins, and gradle as well as I do. In many
ways I wish I didn't have to!

That said, my friendly advice would be to pick one framework and environment
combination and solve this problem end to end. Node would be a perfect start.
Show me how to use your project to make node dev shorter and easier. If I
believe you I will use you and node for new projects. I'm not going to switch
an existing project to jumpstart because I've already set up the flow. Maybe
I'm weird, but I demand single-command builds and deploys. All my projects
already have it. But I'm willing to learn new techs to avoid the pain.

I see your landing page and take away you have lofty goals and are trying to
be all things to all people. Don't. Pick one. Focus. Be the best at it. Make a
YouTube video that shows me how you get 1-second whatever. It's especially
puzzling when you don't have a demo video but you have a produced ad on
"flow." It's hard to believe your product has substance during this launch.

I'm willing to switch to angular and node (or hipster.js and kitkat.io --
whatever, it doesn't really matter) to get what you advertise. For new
projects. I won't touch existing stuff. It means I have to test and am likely
to break something by moving to your project in prod. Nobody ever changes
their build scripts!

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zachinglis
I totally agree. That's why the team has focused on PHP and PHP frameworks
mostly for now. Getting the scripts as right as possible over the months.

And we've been using respected members of the other language communities to
build up the stacks.

I know for someone like me I want one hosting account for everything if I can.
I hate multiple accounts and it's nice to just see everything in one place.

~~~
yajoe
Totally get the strategy, though I was writing PHP apps 10 years ago... I
would be hard pressed to go back, especially after having touched YII last
year. PHP is legacy today, right or wrong.

My point is twofold: First, it's very important to nail a trending language
and framework. Right now that is a short list of Go, pure-JavaScript (firebase
+ angular), node, and maybe django. You are going after mindshare of hackers.
You have to pick the trendy environments. The whole reason people left PHP to
rails was the YouTube video where the guy typed "rails server" and magically
stuff just worked. You need to do the same for the short list above.

Second, you have to show the benefit of your product. Seeing is believing.
Nothing else will substitute.

While this is the anonymous Internet and you know nothing about me, at least
do some gut checks with the current uni kids. Best of luck!

~~~
zachinglis
It is somewhat legacy, and I personally don't use a ton of it. But the
designer world loves it - new frameworks are constantly still coming out on
PHP.

I stopped using PHP so much for that very video. It's very like DHH's video,
that's what we're aiming to do.

Appreciate it.

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shire
is 2013, you would think Django and Rails would be part of this. PHP already
has a ton of support on the web.

~~~
zachinglis
It's part of the plan. We're working together with people like Chad Fowler to
bring that to life. But this is the initial launch with a smaller offering for
now.

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shire
Awesome! really looking forward to it this is very useful, thanks.

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resu
Once my favourite framework is installed, will you abstract out most of the
common configuration / maintenance / tuning steps as well? Or will I have to
ssh in and do that by hand?

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zachinglis
We're trying to make it as few clicks as possible. If you have any requests
feel free to mention them through
[http://help.jumpstarter.io/](http://help.jumpstarter.io/)

We're really keen on working with the community.

~~~
Splendor
I'm not able to access that page.

"Oops! Google Chrome could not find help.jumpstarter.io"

~~~
zachinglis
We're using Desk.com - There status page seems to suggest they had no issues.
I'll have a look and see if I can locate the problem.

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zachinglis
The status page link is online and will track any page outages.
[http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io](http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io)

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blubbi2
I really like the idea, but please include Node.JS or Ruby.

~~~
zachinglis
Being actively worked on! :)

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saraid216
So what is this when it's not being knocked over by the flood of HNers?

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zachinglis
Try again. CDN should be holding now.

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IanCal
Looks interesting!

How much is this? What timescales do you charge by?

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zachinglis
Free for development, fixed fee per project per month for live hosting.

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IanCal
Sounds good, any decision so far on the pricing per month?

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zachinglis
Rather than picking a number out the air, we're going to use the next few
weeks to see people's usage so we can give the fairest price for the service.

We're working on what we think is the best for everyone and will announce it
when we decide :)

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rajivtiru
I only see a 404 page

~~~
zachinglis
Should be fixed now :)

