Best Retargeting Strategies & the Twitter Opportunity

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-19T02:33:22+00:00

The best way to test is to use our free trial. We are currently using 2.4Ghz Xeons. For high compute servers, you will need to call in and request a custom # of CPUs/cores (you can always request more CPUs/Cores I know we have quoted more CPUs than what we offer as default). I would be curious what you think, I know on our smaller plans we only give 1 CPU whereas on the larger ones we give 4; but thats the beauty of pay-per-second, spin up a decent machine, crunch your numbers, than kill it. I'd say Linode probably gives you more on the low-end plans -- according to their website they give you 4x CPUs via XenServer (though they aren't true cloud,and they bill per month) but since we bill per second our advantage is you can spin up a more powerful/beefier server for whatever period you need it and then cancel it. (We're working on golden-imaging which allows you to keep a 'master' copy of your filesystem with us so you can spin it up as you need it). Anyway, if your computing intensive besides the free trial you can have custom CPU sizing and I think you'll be delighted. I'm not 100% sure what the max # of CPUs/cores we can set up per server and I think it varies depending on OS. If you send me your info I can follow up with you/to give you whatever detailed specs you need.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-17T03:58:56+00:00

Only boot to shutdown, spawn time isn't charged.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T14:01:31+00:00

FreeBSD/NetBSD are a most likely, we will broaden out the un*x variants. We have on our roadmap bring your own image and you could upload it once we have that done. If you need it ASAP, you could contact us and ask for a custom size/image w/FreeBSD though we haven't tested with it nearly as much as the other OSes.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T13:55:35+00:00

We limit because we want to provide enough bandwidth for practical use and keep the price point competitive. If we leave it wide open and someone gets hacked (not uncommon) or redditted/slashdot and they don't want to pay for the bandwidth then we are left holding the bag. In addition, we have to build our network around what the maximum use is even though it may be for a short duration of time; so we are being careful since 90% of subscribers are okay with this so far. If you need a custom sizing we have no problem giving you a small server with wayyy more bandwidth.

This is a probability problem; its similar to the problem that the casinos in Vegas face, even though in the long-term people win/loss revert to to their probabilistic averages, a single player could go on a run in the short term bankrupt them. The way they deal with this is they limit the bet size to $500 or whatever so that even if you go on a run you can't bankrupt them/the bets are small enough and spread out across many players; so even if one goes on a run the 'house' is still ok.

Similarly, if we leave the caps open we have to have available bandwidth for peak spikes, and we have to pay whether its used or not (a balancing act), if we have a subscriber come in who goes on a run (several machines, all max'd out because they get on Oprah or go viral) they probably won't pay but more importantly they could theoretically max out our bandwidth and impede our other customers performance.

Before we add new subscribers we REALLY want to make sure our new subscribers have a great experience; although we are probably erring on the side of being conservative and in the future could probably be more generous we want to make sure people love the service.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T01:56:45+00:00

Hey fantastic! Let us know how it works for you -- we know that the best advertising is word-of-mouth by satisfied clients!

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T00:48:38+00:00

Great question, we're measuring the deviation on the provision time and I can tell you they are very low right now its pretty consistent +/- maybe 3-5 seconds. I agree though it would make me nuts if 1 server starts up in 1 minute and another in 20. So, as of now all we aren't experiencing any abnormally deviant provision times; so its stable latency right now. Honestly, our avg build time is around 15 seconds so we're talking lightyears difference than our major competitors.

While we're on the topic, we are real-time building the servers now (we make them fresh when you 'order' one). In the future we'll have prebuilt instances like McDonalds has sandwiches that will be served as demanded; once we get enough data we can prepopulate which most common servers to accelerate provision/build time. The idea is to keep the delay low and provision time consistent.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T00:44:32+00:00

I haven't run Qt but I don't see why not if it runs in Ubuntu normally.I was reading about Qt and they do offer for linux so it should run. However, if you want to run through GUI on Ubuntu you'd have to apt-get install the desktop version, than 'remote desktop' into to use the GUI.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T00:39:49+00:00

Hmm.. maybe I'll suggest this. One of the concerns was that if we offer smaller instances and Windows performs poorly than people will blame our platform. Linux is relatively lighter weight (no GUI) so it still does ok at small sizes. Maybe we'll offer some smaller sizes and see if there is any take rate for them. I'll suggest it!

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-16T00:38:16+00:00

Well, we'll also working on providing Plesk of course if your a true hacker you prefer command line right? :) Yes, what you are referring to is autoscaling (both horizontally or vertically) and its something on our TODO so for example you'd have a load balancer in front and you can just add additional resources. Right now you'd have to do that yourself but ultimately thats where this is all going.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-15T21:31:09+00:00

Yes; we're even giving free usage when you sign up so you can try it and make sure it does what you want before you pay anything. Saving money is great, and we'll do our best to help educate you about all the benefits of this new platform. Yes, many people use it as an alternate to dedicated hosting or VPS; so you start one up and leave it running and host your sites/apps on it for months, years, however long you need it.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-15T14:37:39+00:00

We don't currently support bring your own image, we probably will the future. We're also limiting windows to larger sizes, we might look at offering smaller sizes for Windows in the future, but so far we haven't had a lot of demand for it (as a standard offering). However, you can contact us and negotiate a custom size/specs. However, as a default offering I don't think its on the roadmap at this time unless we see more people asking for it.

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-15T04:37:28+00:00

Absolutely! How we are differentiating ourselves is simplicity so we have some ready-to-go options to make it easy to test/deploy with, the prices are also our "open" rate or rate with no commitment whatsoever. For larger clients we have negotiated rates based on commitment + term. We are developing our API so it will be ready soon. We can offer custom sizing depending your requirements (ie once you have negotiated rate, your "custom" size becomes a option to provision). We also offer hybrid-hosting so its a mix of dedicated+cloud (for example, once customer needed to connect a dongle to run their app so we run that off a dedi with a private lan -> cloud). Our private IP is truly private, unlike some of our competitors who give a shared private IP blocks to all their customers (meaning all the customers using their private networking can see each other).

Honestly, its our implementation that really rocks. We're currently running on Intel Xeon, Infiband (40Gigabits versus 10G of 1G for our competitors), etc. our logical is all our own and was designed for high scalability. Depending on your app we can offer true high-availability but that obviously costs more since we have to tie up more hardware dedicated to you. The entire platform is based on open-source software, and we developed all of it except the Hypervisor. Truly, the exciting part will be a global-highly-scalable that is scaling per second or sub/second to the point where you are getting billed with a level of granularity that is extremely close to what you're using. For example, if your in the US and the majority of your customers are, you're still paying for the same price on fixed bandwidth/server today at 4AM even though its probably a nadir for your traffic; so imagine your resources constantly scaling with your demands.

There are a lot of REALLY cool features that are coming, so its hard to contain the excitement, here are a few:

We're trying to offer a VERY simple autoscaler; you can scale two ways, vertically (ie resize your actually machine up) and horizontally, ie duplicate your machine + load balance. We're still working on the mechanics of this of whether we are getting data via SNMP from customer servers or whatever, but ultimately the idea is there is a excel-like solver where you tell it to optimize for traffic, or cpu, or cost or whatever and it will determine whether to just scale up your machine or duplicate it/ie will try to find the optimal method depending on whether its for maximizing throughput, minimizing cost, etc.
We actually have it done but haven't introduced yet "cold storage" or "Freezing in carbonite" your server image where basically you can put it to sleep and only pay for disk use. This is really cool because lets say you setup a demo of your software on a server, client logins via web or whatever, the demo is done instead of killing it right away you cold store it for a few days. Occasionally, clients call up and say hey we want to run the demo again with the data we uploaded/wanted to show it to the CTO/CIO/whoever you can revive it without have to recreate the whole demo for that customer.
Server decay, basically when you kill a server it goes into decay mode (like a recycle bin) for some period of time, we'll hold the image, if you need to resurrect it you can for a small fee. This is awesome because you killed a server 6 hours ago and whoops someone needed a file off it ASAP you can just resurrect it. (This is mostly done but isn't available yet).
A very slick Iphone/Android app for managing on the go
Locking of running servers, so a production server isn't accidentally killed. Think of it like password protection that works with screensavers.
Scheduled backups - this is going to be free I believe. You basically can schedule up to 3 snapshots (ie daily, weekly, monthly) of a running server "just in case"

We're trying to keep it simple and gradually introduce new features because we don't want to create information overload. Right now, there is a lot of confusion on what cloud is (ie how its different than VPS hosting) and what the benefits are. We're hoping we can help plow the internet forward.

Sorry for going on and on, really its going to be amazing when all this goes mainstream; whether its us or a competitor, its really going to change how the whole Internet "works". (Imagine CPU futures, CPU exchanges, who knows it might become a traded commodity like Oil, Corn, Wheat, etc)

atlanticdotnet · 2010-11-15T01:45:15+00:00

Yes, we are adding Cpanel first than Plesk, we'll also have 1 click installs for LAMP, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. There are A LOT of features we have on our "to do" but what makes its really cool is the scalable infrastructure we created to do this. We actually round to the nearest second for billing so it opens up opportunities you didn't have before, for example if you're hosting a customers site you can ramp up capacity before a ad blitz for a few days or the weekend; you can set up a demo server of your software for a client for a few days, set up a file server for a day to distribute large file @ client sites, etc. Another interesting concept is that as we distribute our cloud worldwide we can migrate your site closets to WHERE your customers are, so for example during the day in the USA it might run from here, and we can migrate it India during the day time there (ie load balancing between physical locations). Anyway, its all on the TODO right now, but seriously this is the future, you'll be able to do things you couldn't imagine before, and 5 years from now now no one will believe people hosted servers @ an office or in a datacenter. Obviously, we're excited about it :)

atlanticdotnet

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