Since other people have ripped apart your site already I'll focus on the good. I like the marketing towards dev teams, I've been thinking about this for sometime. B2B industries are strong and provide secure streams of money.
I started a virtual server service in the past and of course marketed it as such, unfortunately they're a dime a dozen. Your marketing approach might be the edge you need. The $49/month plan ain't bad either, I might grab that just for myself ^-^
One thing to focus on, I think, is to explain what we'd be getting for a CPU, I use Virtual Servers/Machines for everything..even have a few servers at my house for my development needs. Some are old and still usable, while some are razor sharp off the shelf stacked with the latest Xeon's. What I'm getting at is that I don't really care what's in the thing, but I'd like to know what I can run on it efficiently.
For example I buy the $49/12GB package. Do I get more CPU's if I split it up into 6x2GB vs 12x1GB? Or is that a flat rate item of 1vCPU per machine?
In general, how does the splitting thing work? I guess I buy 12 GB RAM + some storage and then can create virtual machines using it up piecemeal?
If so, I quite like that model: It's not overpriced and splitting everything up into individual VPS is useful, esp. if it comes with an API. A single 12 GB VPS is cheaper, but getting 12 1-GB VPS would probably be more expensive, at least at a provider with an API.
Running a hosting business is hard work, I did it for over 10 years. It's under-appreciated, users complain about everything, nobody wants to trust you, and many of the customers you do remain want to bleed your support dry. Some of the most successful hosting companies have succeeded by eliminating SLAs and making support hard to reach. Others such as Rackspace make support easy to get, but make sure the customers pay for the privilege. All of the problems with trying to start a hosting company are clear from the responses here.
One of the problems in this space is that it's a mature market. Developers are accustomed to Amazon, Digital Ocean, Linode, Azure, and GCE. These are mature products and yes, users are skeptical of new entrants that don't do as much, don't have a complete product, or even have put effort into their website. For HackerNews, it's ironic, but clearly this audience is expecting a mature product not a lean approach. (Self-provisioning while now industry-standard requires a significant effort to prevent fraud & abuse, and slow-provisioning is completely in-line with Lean methodologies)
So, some advice:
* Don't give up just because of the bad feedback. Iterate!
* Focusing on devs is probably wrong if you don't have a plan to leverage individual sales to enterprise sales. Individuals pay less and you need more of them. More customers usually equals more support, they're more fickle, and less likely to be retained. Perhaps surprisingly, they're also traditionally seasonal, with dev-based buy-in being strongest during summer.
* Find a hook. Something you do better, or different. For my hosting company, it was virtual servers for only $6/mo, when at the time the lowest priced alternative was $20/mo. We adopted an architecture that allowed us to radically compete on price. It doesn't have to be price, and honestly, it's better that it's not. Also make sure the hook is understood by the market, one of my company's problems was that our low price had us compared to shared hosting or container-based solutions, because virtual servers at that price was too unbelievable.
* Hack trust. Some people here mention trust. Now, I think this is over-valued. People put data with companies they really don't know much about all the time. At some point, nobody knew who Dropbox, Docker, or Digital Ocean were. If, however, this proves to be a problem - and it could be in the current surveillance state - then look at ways to hack trust. For instance, a service such as AWS Lambda has a different threat (and trust) model than EC2, based solely on how developers use these products. If you stick with VM-based hosting, then develop partnerships, get reference customers, bring on staff that the community already knows, loves, and trusts.
Just a note to the makers of ramgrid -- while many of these comments may be harsh, it is probably not in your best interest to respond in anger/defensively.
This page is a trove of feedback from potential users of your product.
I personally chose a cloud hosting company called INIZ (that I'm extremely happy with) based on comments and a mention on HN -- just trying to let you know, this is your crowd, and they're angry/confused about your site. Find a way to fix it.
Bunnie Huang had a really interesting take on the evolution of the markets. It was just a 30 second quip, a mere nugget falling from the ingot which was the lecture. This won't do it justice but to paraphrase him he basically said (w/r/t Shenzhen where effectively every retailer is selling a commodity, eventually they bottom out in price-competition) - the way that merchants differentiate themselves is via being "the guy" who can provide services in a reliable fashion. He goes to the same guy every time to pick up his 10k spools of resistors to throw into the pick'n'place even if its a few cents more on the bottom-line to the BOM[1] because he has developed a relationship and reputation with those vendors. I've had some catastrophic failures with Rackspace but even with proof of concepts with one tiny 400/mo box[0] they spent easily 12-15 hours with high-level engineers to help resolve some pretty obscure WAS stuff. I'm pretty sure they ended up bringing in software guys to help, or those Rackspace IT guys had some of the most in-depth and wide-range knowledge I've only seen in people like Brad Fitzpatrick[2]. They really went above and beyond - which is why I don't mind paying 4x what an OVH box might cost.
There are so many shitty engineers, shitty lawyers, shitty automotive mechanics, doctors and hosts out there that your market differentiation can literally be phrased in a sentence: "Be just a little bit more competent & reliable than your lazy competition". I'm not the smartest guy, but being dependable to your customers is certainly worth paying the premium.[3]
[0] I've got a lot of equipment with them so I'd expect that kind of treatment if I was operating under my own account but this was off a brand-new account where a speculator bought an energies trading platform from a distressed company. His IT partner didn't have much WebSphere experience so he brought me in, gave me the company card and asked me to get it to work
[1] Even the high priced merchants in Shenzhen are significantly cheaper than what we get at Digi-key and Mouser :(
[2] In that, you'd be very hard pressed to find an engineer who can code "high level Perl" (it was as high level as web-apps went during the LiveJournal days), could write Memcached, could write kernel patches for network drivers, do UI (though things were admittedly far more simple then), all the while taking care of the physical IT ops (see: Coders at Work, for a fantastic account)
[3] And any client you have who doesn't recognize this, you should choose to fire as soon as possible. They don't see the value in the services you deliver and you surely aren't being compensated appropriately.
FAQ when signed in:
"Each plan has a maximum capacity for the amount of servers its allowed to create. Due to the significant amount of dedicated resources we provide, we can't literally give you unlimited servers. However, you could upgrade your plan whenever you'd like."
So your marketing page is LITERALLY a lie. Good job.
This isn't specific to HN, you get the same thing on various subreddits on reddit (e.g. /r/science and /r/technology), and probably the same thing on any technically-oriented community forum that discusses new or any tech. HN is great but let's not start a circlejerk around a common feature of any strong community.
How about making the counter-argument that maybe all the energy is being spent on making the service good? If you had 50 hours to do something, and you either had the choice of spending 10 of it making your own marketing materials, or 1 of it for making a good looking page with a preexisting work, why not go with 1, if you want to spend 9 more hours perfecting the engineering side?
Edit: I take it back. It seems to be serious and not just a test. I found the creator's LinkedIn.[1]
Previous comment: Probably a landing page to test a concept before the concept is developed. It's done frequently, but this person has done it rather sloppily.
From a self-written description of his previous project:
"I know what you're thinking. FkPaying is a brand new way to watch movies, download books, and download music. I built out a really nice website that's very intuitive and user friendly. Yeah... if you're reading this, the website might have been taken down by the FBI. It was a good run, folks. I hope I don't get taken to jail for this."
Yeah, seems proud of being taken down by the FBI. I'm not really comfortable with people that take such pride in pushing the limits of the law and it doesn't bode well for the reputation of this current venture.
Wow, really? I might need to report my card "lost" so that I can get a new number. Stripe protects that information from the vendor, right?
Though I doubt this kid is going to try to be that brazen, especially since he is using his real name to do this (assuming this isn't a fake identity).
Might request a new number just in case. I really don't trust this asshole anymore.
I wouldn't be too hasty to call him an asshole. Based on his LinkedIn, I think he's just a kid without any work experience and, consequently, without much understanding of professionalism. "FuckPaying" seem to be not that different from one of us wanting to start some kind of Napster when we were young, and I think a lot of grown HN users are probably PopcornTime users...
He's an "assistant instructor" at at least one school/program, and others. This isn't a "kid" if he's teaching other people.
We can't and shouldn't blame potential fraud on simple "youth" for someone who is obviously of an age that he is teaching other people to do these things.
There's a service behind this, I can confirm it. I just wasted $9 on a broken VPS.
I am not worried about that $9 because I spent that expecting this to be a bust. I've spent far more on stupider things. It'll certainly be the last $9 I spend on this though.
Also both pages under "For those who may sue us". Actually, just all of that section - you need a ramgrid account to view their refund policy (apparently different to the 404 footer one), or "FOR THE FEDS & CO" law enforcement guide/copyright policy. Also the search bar doesn't work.
I don't think it is a lie I think it is poor wording.
He mentions it is aimed at dev teams to easily allocate resources. I think the packages are you pay for a certain amount of RAM (i.e. 1GB, 12 GB, 100 GB, etc) and you can divide that on to an unlimited number of servers.
So lets say I have a team of 6 people and I buy the 12 GB I can create 12 1GB servers, or I can create 6 2GB servers, or I can create 4 2GB servers and 3 1GB servers.
If I have a team of 10 and I buy the "customize anyway plan" I could have instances that were 1GB, some that were 4GB and others that were 2GB.
You buy the resources but can divvy it up into other instances that make sense for your team (at least that is what I gather).
Nope. I signed up (there's $9 I'm not seeing again) and you can only make 1GB servers. After you make two on the "Personal" plan, you get a message that you can't create any more:
Stop right there!
You have created all of the servers your Personal tier
allows you to create. If you would like to upgrade your
plan, please create a support ticket under the Billing
section or send an e-mail anytime you're ready to
business@ramgrid.com.
But if there is a minimum of 1GB RAM per server, and the plan allows for up to 2GB total, then you can literally only create two 1GB servers. I'm not sure how a limit of two equates to unlimited. I was really confused by that on the pricing page.
but isn't it the same with Amazon and all these other "unlimited backup" solutions? They are all literally a lie if you dig deep enough...some cases more deep than others.
Yep. It's a hosting cliche at this point, it's never really unlimited, it's almost almost overselling with a small note in the terms and conditions saying that some nebulous resource limit applies.
It's pretty well known over at Web Hosting Talk. It's one of the reasons services by a certain notorious company called EIG have a poor reputation.
Doesn't make it any more ethical to do it here though. The hosting business may be filled to the brim with sleazy companies and dodgy deals, but you don't need to do likewise in order to become successful.
Some additional info, for those who are curious. I can't provide any interpretation, but I figured my $9 could help somebody. :)
MotD:
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-32-generic i686)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
System information as of Mon Feb 1 14:14:55 EST 2016
System load: 0.0 Processes: 86
Usage of /: 4.5% of 18.32GB Users logged in: 1
Memory usage: 7% IP address for eth0: 158.69.xxx.xxx
Swap usage: 0%
Graph this data and manage this system at:
https://landscape.canonical.com/
108 packages can be updated.
95 updates are security updates.
Your Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) is supported until April 2017.
Last login: Fri Jan 29 22:49:53 2016
---
/proc/cpuinfo:
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 86
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU D-1540 @ 2.00GHz
stepping : 2
microcode : 0xffffffff
cpu MHz : 1999.936
cache size : 12288 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 1
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fdiv_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 13
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss syscall nx lm constant_tsc eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movbe
popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch xsaveopt fsgsbase bmi1 hle avx2 smep bmi2 erms rtm
bogomips : 3999.87
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 42 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
And if you don't have a mailto: program, the "Enterprise" and "Education" links do nothing.
To add to your suspicions, the website layout is exactly the same as one of the new bootstrap v4.0 themes, and is just as vague about it's product. (http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing)
Even the pricing $9, $45 and $119 are the same and the footer text is the same too.
"We’ve been working on Go Analytics for the better part of a decade and are super proud of what we’ve created. If you’d like to learn more, or are interested in a job, contact us anytime at themes@getbootstrap.com."
"We’ve been working on RamGrid for the better part of the last couple of years and are super proud of what we’ve created. If you’d like to learn more, or are interested in a job, contact us anytime at business@ramgrid.com."
Is this some kind of MVP to test the water? Probably not, and just a silly joke...
I absolutely can't stand pages like this. I know it's completely minimal and not really a big deal but this keeps happening.
Show HNers - If I've hit the bottom of the page and I click on a "Features" link, or heck, any link in the footer I do not want to jump back up the page. I already scrolled past it. It doesn't give enough information. Either have a separate page that goes into more detail or don't link in the footer! I'm at the bottom of the page, you're safe to assume I already went past the part you're linking to!
This appears to be a half-functioning project by an inexperienced but enthusiastic young person that has gotten way more attention and been taken more seriously than he imagined.
I can see myself having done something like this when I was 13 or 14, meaning well and just wanting to be involved in a startup. But I think he used a bootstrap template that made the page and product look just good enough that people here are giving it a serious evaluation as a hosting business. It is clearly not ready for serious use, but it is an interesting lesson about how wide open tech is for anyone to come along and create a business.
Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do.
The problem was the number of mistakes made:
* Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services.
* Including a racial slur in a 503 page.
* Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2.
* Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification.
* 404'd refund and legal pages.
* Not established as a LLC.
* No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS)
* Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server.
* No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all.
* Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house.
This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life.
Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.
The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges.
A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.
I'm a little leery when the "refunds" link is dead and there is no "contact" page for a business. Hard to vet the legitimacy of a company without that information in my opinion. A lot of the site seems very cut-and-paste as well with several "coming soon" features and very little descriptive information. I would have thought this to have been worked out given this has been in the works "for a couple years" per the owner(s).
I also don't see how this stands out from the thousands of other companies out there offering "cloud hosting" of some sorts - do you own your own facilities? Lease them? Use other providers? What type of equipment is this and where are you located? etc. Not nearly enough information to determine a unique competitive advantage from what I can see.
What type of security measures do you use? The only "description" I see is "top notch" which doesn't tell me anything. Any compliance info you can share? Security audit results? Something? Anything?
Just my first instinctual opinion here, trying to offer some constructive feedback.
It seems a self-written description of the owner's "previous projects" include an FBI Takedown on one of them - and he's seemingly proud of it. This doesn't bode well for the legitimacy of the current venture:
"I know what you're thinking. FkPaying is a brand new way to watch movies, download books, and download music. I built out a really nice website that's very intuitive and user friendly. Yeah... if you're reading this, the website might have been taken down by the FBI. It was a good run, folks. I hope I don't get taken to jail for this."
Couple that with the overwhelming issues others have brought up here and I have doubts this is a serious business at all.
Wow, I wouldn't trust that site with even a single cent, even the prices are the same as the ones on the bootstrap template O.o
I like the name though
Edit: Also the about talks about there's been spent years on this, while the website looks like something slapped together in a couple of minutes at best.
Damn, I always write "would" instead of "wouldn't" ...
I'm just saying, that I don't actually think years was spent on it the product simply because the site is lacking, could be external web developer making it cheaply, I wouldn't know.
Some feedback for you: I read your webpage and I'm unclear as to why you are better than, or even different from, Amazon.
And glancing at your pricing, I think Amazon is cheaper too.
I'd suggest adding a grid or a bullet list enumerating how you are different.
Also, something to keep in mind -- when launching a new product that replaces the functionality of another, you can't be just as good, or even slightly better, you need to be significantly better to get someone to move. So you should focus on showing why you would be significantly better than your competitors that you're trying to displace.
Good to see that there's room for some competition in this space!
You are loading two HTTP assets on your landing page, resulting in security warnings for mixed content.
The pricing model is interesting but the wording isn't very clear: what does "monthly RAM kick-start " mean? How does it relate with "Unlimited 1GB or 2GB RAM servers" ?
There really isn't much room at all. If anything, the room is a race to the bottom.
There's room in niche hosting services, like WordPress or Magento, and you can make a pretty penny off it. But your typical shared, VPS, or dedicated? Yeah, good luck competing.
Well, I'll be honest... I'm not too sure about this service, or the idea behind it. I mean, hosting (both in the 'cloud' and non cloud sense) is a really competitive, cut throat industry with players able (and willing) to spend millions of dollars on advertising and services.
And people kind of want stability in this type of thing. So if you want Ramgrid to do well, you're gonna have to prove you can keep the company going for at least a few years in order to convince people you're reliable. Remember, many hosting companies are fly by night operations (there's even jokes about some of them being set up by high school kids in the summer holidays), and people are hence more than a tad wary of new ventures in this space. Especially when they don't have a big name like Amazon's behind them.
I think it's trying to play in the same space as http://wable.com
That is to say, you pay for a bundle of resources (x cpu cores, x gb memory, x gb disk, x ipv4) at a fixed price. Then, you can subdivide that into however many VPS instances as you want (well, within reason).
As for trusting it, well...it looks like there might not be much of actual service behind the front page. It's possible it's just a tweaked version of this bootstrap theme: http://themes.getbootstrap.com/products/marketing
That said, the Wable business model seems to be popular, and they don't appear to have much competition using the "resource bundle" model.
I've checked out Wable - are there any other providers that you know of that provide resource bundling like Wable? I really like Wable but I don't see an API, and for what I'm doing would have to have an API to control creation/deletion of servers. Thanks!
Looks interesting and a nice landing page, but your main problem will be trust. Probably for that reason needs a lot more detail (datacentre, tech, investments). I'd remove the word unlimited from both plans as it is highly misleading.
An API is probably not going to gain you customers before the above.
It seems like they're just renting OVH dedicated servers (https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/hosting/) and selling virtual machines on them. You could get cheaper pricing and more reliable servers by purchasing VPS from OVH directly, or going through a more reputable provider that resells OVH like My Custom Hosting or Luna Node.
"Never experience the hassle of ... while saving a bunch of money"
Wait, you mean that if I don't use your service then I'll have hassles but at least I'll save money? That's how it reads. You seem to expect that people will parse it like this.
(never-experience X) while Y
Unfortunately, most people parse it like this.
never-experience (X while Y)
Try each one out on "never experience burning your hand while cooking breakfast". Do you see the difference, and why the front-page copy might make some people giggle?
Good on you for trying something. I hope you learn from this. I can only imagine the trouble I would have gotten into if the internet/social media were around when I was a teenager or even in college.
Hmmm.. still not activated, and I received an email offering a refund.
Too bad, I was looking forward to launching a server, and running the IP address through ARIN. I suspect the service is just software running atop Digital Ocean or AWS.
I was signing up and had some questions right off the start. What is included in standard support and how is it different from 9-5 support? You have DDoS protection for $10 extra. If I buy the DDoS protection but others on your network do not, am I still protected from their potential DDoS attacks?
The API is interesting; looks more like a natural language versus syntax. I'm actually working on something that would be able to create that syntax for you though it's not something you'd be able to integrate anytime soon however I do see the value in it!
Boy, I read through and thought this was a parody.
"Security: We guarantee top notch security from the minute you're on the payment page to the second you start creating servers." Meaning that the security ends the moment you start creating a server?
It looks like they are trying to use the same model as http://wable.com/.
They sell you a monthly subscription to a resource bundle (some # of cpus, ram, disk space, ipv4s) that you can then run as 1 large VPS, or 3 medium ones, or 4 smalls + 1 medium, etc.
Wable is fairly popular because of this approach, and they are relatively unique in doing it that way.
Enjoy the free $9. Your service is unusable, so I'll never really be using it. It'll be the only $9 you ever get from me.
My first step with any VPS is to run "sudo apt-get update". This generates a ton of checksum errors.
I figured I would get around to that later, so I updated what I could. Then I tried to install Asterisk, but it appears that you stripped all the default repositories out of apt, because that package isn't available.
Oh well, I guess I'll compile it from source. Nevermind, make and gcc aren't installed! I was able to install make using apt-get, but not gcc!
I shouldn't have to go through this many hoops. The OS shouldn't come broken like it is. Just push out server-core like you should have to begin with!
It's like you tried to make this service as intentionally bad as you possibly could.
EDIT:
This is so stupid I can't even begin to understand why you would do this:
"If the emergency is completely life threatening and our instant messaging support isn't appearing right now, do not hesitate to call us at: [redacted]. However, you will only weaken relations if you called and the problem is something that literally wasn't life threatening. Like, you actually seriously need to be dying in order to call us."
Don't EVER suggest that someone should call you in a life-threatening situation. I understand you're exaggerating, but you could be sued for millions if anyone ever called that number and they were in an actual life-or-death situation. The only acceptable number to call in a life-threatening situation is 911 (or 999, or whatever you call in your home country).
If you don't want people to call you, don't give out your phone number. It's very simple.
Your site isn't just bad. You could ruin your life with serious legal issues over all of this stuff.
Please, for the love of God, tell me you established an LLC and aren't the sole-proprietor of this monstrosity...
EDIT2:
I just spoke to the founder over support chat, and he's being very humble and apologetic over the problems. He's disabled all recurring billing so that he can end this experiment gracefully and continue working out the kinks before the actual launch. We overwhelmed him a little.
I'll give him credit where credit is due: Half-baked or not, he's taking this seriously and trying to right wrongs. I look forward to seeing what the next four weeks have in store, and I am going to work with him to be the best beta-tester I can.
It isn't a scam, so don't worry. I wouldn't suggest signing up for this for any reason other than to experiment and help him beta-test. It's not stable enough for use with production servers. Hopefully he'll clarify that to potential customers before they sign up, because unlike me, some people may have intended to do real-world things with this service.
EDIT3:
Oh nevermind. Founder is clueless. He stopped responding to me when I told him that I had completely lost control over my services, and when I tried to open a support ticket, this happened:
I cannot stress enough that there is nothing on Earth that you handle this way. I am putting 3/1/16 on my calendar, because I'm almost certain I'm going to need to dispute a credit card charge on that day. I don't think I can take his word when he says he disabled recurring payments...
Morbid curiosity: you want to install and run Asterisk, the PBX software, on a $9 VPS from a provider that just announced with a Bootstrap template today?
It was cheap and Stripe is secure. I could part with $9 to play around with a potentially shitty service. I was going to run an instance of Lenny on Asterisk, so it's not like I was doing anything important with this.
Registration is closed. Refunds have been issued. If you paid for this service, check your e-mail and get your refund. They're closing up shop. This was a total trainwreck.
I started a virtual server service in the past and of course marketed it as such, unfortunately they're a dime a dozen. Your marketing approach might be the edge you need. The $49/month plan ain't bad either, I might grab that just for myself ^-^
One thing to focus on, I think, is to explain what we'd be getting for a CPU, I use Virtual Servers/Machines for everything..even have a few servers at my house for my development needs. Some are old and still usable, while some are razor sharp off the shelf stacked with the latest Xeon's. What I'm getting at is that I don't really care what's in the thing, but I'd like to know what I can run on it efficiently.
For example I buy the $49/12GB package. Do I get more CPU's if I split it up into 6x2GB vs 12x1GB? Or is that a flat rate item of 1vCPU per machine?