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Comment by barranger | Hacker News Reader

What performance can I expect from a single instance? I know that your doing shared hosting on AWS Instances, but not sure which EC2 type, nor how many instances are being deployed to each. Without knowing that, it's hard to comment on whether five cents an hour is worth it or not (also that is time that the application is deployed correct, not compute time?)

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We're monitoring the performance of our beta users apps and will figure out a reasonable estimate of what to expect before we begin charging. In terms of processing power we're currently aiming at performance roughly equivalent of 1/2 EC2 CU.

The prices are for the time the application instance is live rather than compute time.

I really don't want this to come across as rude, as maybe I have missed something but this sounds like you've set pricing before you actually know what you're going to have to spend on hosting yourself?

Happy to hear how I've missed something :-)

That's a tough decision that all PaaS providers face: offer simple predictable pricing, and face the risk of unpredictable, possibly even negative margins? Or safely convey the infrastructure's variable costs, leaving Amazon in control of the relationship with your customer?

The AppHarbour guys are right to focus on pricing as early as they can: it's the hardest part. I advise the myriad of Heroku clones out there to do the same.

I'll second that. Especially in the .net ecosystem, it will be much easier for me to sell a PaaS provider to enterprise customers with a pricing model than without.

It should be noted that these are preliminary prices. I've updated the page so this is clearer. That being said we're quite certain about the pricing structure from what we've gathered so far.

Thanks for your inputs :-)

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