
Hosting disrupted – 1 second installs, forking apps, container-based - versusdotcom
http://jumpstarter.io/
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grageth
So I decided to do some really quick math here. Assuming a 30 day month and 1
request per second average that is 2.5 million requests. I don't know everyone
else but I build web apps not web pages and requests to my api alone would
exceed that a month. And I'm hosting stuff on $20 linode boxes that handle
that just fine, heck a free tier AWS server handles that. No amount of "Ease"
can offset that pricing. I'm very curious as to what kinds of apps they
envision hosting, or if you're planning on using this what kind of apps are
you hosting?

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zachinglis
There's two reasons: 1) Ease 2) Tech

Our ease is worth it. If you save 1 hour of work, you've made your money back
— and probably have even more. And honestly; not everyone has the skills to
build stuff on Linode. Quite often they want to focus on just working on the
client's website.

Our tech is very impressive. We've got a great development team working hard
on building a very robust system. Using us you'd find that.

I can understand what you're saying though. But I can guarantee we're a
different experience and result than plain old AWS or a blank Linode box.

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grageth
Appreciate the response. Certainly going to give it a go. I tweeted, but could
you point me in the direction of your definition of a request?

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zachinglis
Our request model is http requests. I'll try and make that clearer on the
homepage.

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gnud
Under pricing, it says '10 million visitors' in the copy. There's quite a
difference between 10 million requests and 10 million visitors.

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zachinglis
Thanks for that spot. We had our metrics labelled as visitors but felt it was
too confusing. It's definitely requests. Will change it :)

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moconnor
Looks interesting but nothing on the site seems to answer my question: can I
run node.js apps here? Flask? Or is it wordpress / PHP only?

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zachinglis
Right now; no. We've got support in the works but we wanted to get the
features tighter before we added another language. We use Node ourselves for
our sites and it's important to us (and me) that we have it.

tl;dr very very soon! :)

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elyase
"Right now; no." No to all mentioned languages/frameworks or only no to
Node.js?

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zachinglis
It's PHP only right this second. We have a branch for Node, but we have no ETA
on when that'll be live. We want it as much as you guys; so soon :)

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johnchristopher
Impressive. It has been a long time since I signed up on any hosting plan just
to give it a spin.

Something on the page convinced me somehow to try it out and 5 minutes later I
am happily viming through SSH at some index.html in a html5 boiler plate. I
suppose that is because there are no credit card required (important for me as
I don't have, don't need and don't want one).

The set-up process was really smooth.

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hosay123
How do you usually pay for stuff online?

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johnchristopher
I rarely do. When I have to (or want to) I ask a relative or a close friend of
mine. Usually my brother. I think in the last ten year I haven't made more
than ten online purchases.

So... Not owning a credit cart isn't (for the moment) an inconvenience for me
because I rarely need to use one and if I have to I can find someone to help
me with it.

I pay my bills via the online banking system my bank set up though. I use a
card (one issued by my bank to each of its clients that allows me to pay for
stuff IRL or to retrieve cash from ATMs) with a little calculator-like device
that churns out temporary authentication codes. This system only works with my
bank though ; I can't use it to buy from online vendors[0]. But I don't think
it qualifies as online purchases. It wouldn't let me buy hosting for instance
:)

[0] there are some exceptions though. ie mobile company generates links that
initiate a transaction I have to confirm via the calculator and by logging
into my bank.

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zachinglis
Hi, Creative Director of Jumpstarter here :) Feel free to ask any questions.

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subbz
What happens if I exceed my traffic? There's a large gap between FREE and $49.

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zachinglis
We'll warn you before you get there. And if it happens, we'll give you a grace
period and work with you on how we can find a solution so we're both happy.

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porker
The architecture page is great
[http://jumpstarter.io/technical](http://jumpstarter.io/technical) but all
these providers are for a 'Shared nothing' setup.

What would hosting like this - heroku style - look like for JVM-backed apps?
E.g. written in Closure, Scala or plain old Java, where you want to persist
stuff between requests?

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emilv
I'm an early beta user. Your web app is run in a virtual machine. You can
store stuff to disk, in memory or in your own database (the PHP container
gives you a database per default). I am not sure what happens to stuff in RAM
if they choose to migrate you to a new host machine, though.

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domrdy
This looks really cool and also impressive speed! I noticed when adding a
custom (sub)domain it'd warn me about the domain not being registered. It does
however seem to happily resolve to the site, so I'm happy!

Edit: Working now :) Also, mounting the folders over ssh feels very responsive
and fast, great job.

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mariusandra
Hey, I currently host ~10 low traffic PHP websites on a $5/month DigitalOcean
droplet. So far it works well, even on peak days when my wordpress blog has
gotten ~15k visitors. I would love to switch to your service for the sheer
convenience it brings, however I'm hesitant to part with $50 every month for
this. $10 or $15 for a 100k hits per month plan would be a no brainer though.

And a $0.0001/request pricing model would totally revolutionise hosting :-).

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phoe
You seem to be able to clone whole projects to mass produce wordpress or other
PHP projects..

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zachinglis
Indeed! :) The idea is that you can create starters for your projects.

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notacoward
The use of Ceph is interesting. For what? VM images? (Disclaimer: I'm a
GlusterFS developer.)

Also, I hope people who sign up realize that jumpstarter.io is posting to
Twitter under their names. Blech.

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zachinglis
It's actually not. People click a tweet button, then review and post their
tweet. :)

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slimbods
Tried it, like it. Worried about how easy it is to create a site without any
'are you human' checks though. Isn't this going to create tonnes of bot sites?

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zachinglis
This was a worry to us. It'd be a big detriment to us if that happened. We're
trying to keep the user the priority, rather than nasty captchas. So we've got
our own implementations. The moment we see bots, we'll switch our strategy. :)

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ddorian43
300K/month requests can mean many different things

looks like the storage is on a different server than the application? is that
the same for the db ?

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zachinglis
300k http(s) requests.

Everything is super optimised, so don't worry about where things are. It's all
been meticulously tested for speed. HOWEVER, they're separately on a Ceph
cluster.

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ddorian43
i can :

encode video, transform images, other cpu/memory/disk/bandwidth intensive
tasks

on each of those requests...

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zachinglis
It's your space, and your CPU time. It won't affect anyone else. However,
every member is subject to fair usage. We'll do whatever we can to be
accommodating but if you're maxing out the CPU all the time, then we'll
negotiate on what we can do to help you keep running.

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foolinaround
How does running of nightly cron jobs that email out once a day work in this
plan?

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zachinglis
It's not a feature implemented yet, but we're going to add it. We need to
adapt it to our architecture and make it scalable.

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chendriksen
What are the perks for founding members?

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zachinglis
Right now, a badge. We're contemplating what exactly to give. I suspect
there'll be discounts and special rewards in the future though.

A startups life is really given life by the early adopters. And we think we
should recognise those people for believing in us :) Hopefully we can in this
way.

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SchizoDuckie
$50 for a month for a personal website?

Thanks, but no.

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zachinglis
Many websites. I use it for me and my clients too. :) Which works out really
nicely.

Just a personal website would probably fit nicely into the Free plan :)

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toomuchtodo
Or I could host it in S3 for ~$15/year.

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zachinglis
Sure, you could. But there's a ton of differences as you can see. It depends
if you want automatic vs manual. And if you got the time to do manual, then I
get that. But it's all about saving the users time, so they can focus on the
core parts.

Dropbox could all be hosted on S3, but the ease is worth it. Etc.

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kbar13
Please add flask!

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zachinglis
We'll add it to our requests list but no ETA as of yet! :)

