

 Review my startup, mist.io - mobile friendly cloud management/monitoring - unweb
https://mist.io

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toddmorey
My opinion: you've asked for feedback on this a bit too early. It's really
hard to review your startup before the product, pricing, or even a demo is
available. I do think CloudKick and more recently Cloudability have proved
there's some merit to this idea. How is Mist.io different? How is it better?

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unweb
CloudKick is no longer available to new users. Mist.io is mobile friendly,
supports private clouds & the monitoring agent will be released as free/open
source software.

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josegonzalez
No demo, no screenshots, and no real list of features/things your app does.
Why, as an ops guy with a trillion other services with these items available,
would I sign up for this?

Feel free to add at least screenshots, as that definitely would help pique my
interest.

~~~
unweb
The initial feature set is that you'll be able to create/destroy/tag/reboot
and send arbitrary ssh commands to your VMs from your phone, tablet or laptop
at no cost. Monitoring and sms/email alerting will be available for a small
fee.

We're still working on the user interface so we're not quite ready to publish
screenshots yet. Check back soon!

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CharlesPal
I'd like to see more on the main page about pricing. You mentioned "Both the
core service and the monitoring agent will be Free Software" but is there a
charge for the service?

On a side note... This is a great idea, I am the founder of
<http://ratemystartup.com> \- If you would like to submit your startup there I
should be able to get you up on the site quickly.

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unweb
Thank you. We will definitely submit it.

There will be a small monthly charge per VM after enabling monitoring &
alerting. We're still working on the pricing policy.

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CharlesPal
Great, we'll look forward to that.

That definitely sounds fair. I would get that pricing page up as soon as
possible, users always want to see that.

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unweb
Done! We just submitted it on ratemystartup.com

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CharlesPal
All set, for a fellow HN reader we bumped you to the front of the queue.
(currently about a 4-5 week backlog) [http://ratemystartup.com/manage-and-
monitor-your-virtual-mac...](http://ratemystartup.com/manage-and-monitor-your-
virtual-machines-mist-io/)

Hopefully this gives you some additional well deserved exposure.

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mshafrir
FYI, I run Chrome with the Better Pop Up Blocker extension, and when I first
loaded your site I got nothing but a gray screen. I see "Uncaught TypeError:
Property 'scrollTo' of object [object Window] is not a function" in the
developer console.

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cpsaltis
We'll look into it, but it appears to be related to Better Pop Up Blocker
[http://code.google.com/p/betterpopupblocker/issues/detail?id...](http://code.google.com/p/betterpopupblocker/issues/detail?id=1)

~~~
mshafrir
For the time being, you could just check to see if window.scrollTo != null

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latch
Beautiful website. Good job explaining what it is.

I'd put a screenshot (or an approximate mockup) of the app inside the tablet,
rather than the mist.io logo. Seems like a wasted opportunity of "a picture's
worth a thousand words."

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akh
Looks pretty cool, are you using some cloud management platform's APIs
underneath (like scalr, rightscale, enstratus etc)? Does it only support VMs?
or can I attach my EBS volumes when I launch a new VM as well?

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unweb
We're using libcloud as a unified interface to the EC2/RackSpace/OpenStack
API's. We'll only support VMs at the beginning.

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dmix
Don't really do much sys admin stuff anymore.

Re the copywriting: "Mobile friendly web app" sounds awkward.

Just say "straight from your mobile phone" or something similar.

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alttab
Not sure how you are going to charge for monitoring when any competent devops
manager will know how to use Nagios.

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JustinJ70s
There are plenty of paid online services for monitoring - take Pingdom for
example.

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cpsaltis
and boundary.com and several others, but none that allow you to address issues
from your mobile phone.

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alttab
That is a feature, not a lasting competitive advantage. What if you could
address issues from your phone? Whats the barrier to entry to that?

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there
Not much to review. Where is the demo or at least some screenshots?

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unweb
We're working on it. Meanwhile we would like some feedback on the business
perspective.

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t33
really interesting!

