VS.
I blasted the poor showing of innovative technology at Tech Crunch, and though I didn't talk much about it, I should have spent more time blasting the selection of the winner, Yammer. It was a joke. Sure the service may be decent. One of my friends, a fellow entrepreneur, loves their product, but come on. The winner of Tech Crunch... was a product that copied another product (Twitter) and applied to to a different market (the enterprise). I'm not talking smack about Yammer as much as I'm talking about the poor criteria for selecting a winner.
Without further ado, I just signed up for an account on GoGrid - a cloud computing platform that is competing head to head with Amazon's EC2 service. They had a demo setup at Tech Crunch and spoke to me at length about their offering.
First of all, what is this cloud computing stuff anyway? It's really the idea of having your servers hosted in the cloud (internet). You don't need to have any infrastructure expertise. Just deploy your apps to your virtual servers and the cloud hosting company handles everything else. Load balancing, DNS stuff, mail stuff, scaling, etc.
They charge based on how much stuff you use. There's a charge for having your server on ($72/month for 1 CPU and $72/month for 1Gb/RAM). Of course, as usage increases, so too does your CPU and RAM need. They also charge .10/Gb of bandwidth out and free inbound. Matched up against Amazon, they beat them in pricing and services: GoGrid vs. Amazon.
You could easily spend $40/month and get virtual hosting. But scaling is not trivial with a non-cloud service. And tech support, data storage, and bandwidth are all incrementally more expensive.
I'll update our experience with GoGrid as we progress...
If you need cloud computing, try GoGrid with this promo code (for a $50 credit): GOGOTRIAL50 or call them. I got a $100 credit with a phone call.
4 comments:
Really? GoGrid? ServePath? Kmart for computing... Good luck.
Haha! Any info with that comment would be nice. Yes, we're using it for our alpha testing which should give us a good indication of their services. Using Rails and Capistrano will make deployment across any number of different hosting services pretty easy, so if we have problems - we'll easily be able to switch.
How has your experience been so far with GoGrid? Why did you decide to go with this over EC2?
@Anonymous - actually, the first commenter was right. I have been very unimpressed with GoGrid. Their support is terrible. We've had a few problems dealing with them and we're looking elsewhere for our production boxes. To sum: response time, lack of support knowledge, outsourced support staff that isn't in contact with their domestic support staff. We initially chose them for price, to be honest. And unfortunately, you get what you pay for.
Post a Comment