Ask HN: Please review my startup, www.cloudorado.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my startup, www.cloudorado.com

23 pointsokrasz38 comments

Hi Everyone,

Over last several months I’ve been developing a cloud computing (IaaS) comparison engine. I’ve reached a state where it achieved some usefulness. Therefore I would like to share it with you and get some feedback before I go any further with it.

http://www.cloudorado.com/ (it may not work without www yet).

The service is something like pricegrabber.com for cloud computing – you specify resources you need for cloud servers and it will present offers from multiple providers.

It is done in GWT + SmartGWT. I’ve chosen this technology, since it allows client side calculations, without network and server delays. Therefore you can use sliders and see how prices change without any delay. There is one side effect though – it is quite big to load. So to minimize the negative effect of loading at start I present a static version (widgets does not work at all), which is replaced with actual interactive version as soon as it loads up. You shouldn’t even notice it, unless you try using sliders or links before it actually boots up. Probably this is a good subject for another article.

Going back to the feedback I have several areas that bothers me, so I would really appreciate if you could take them into account.

1. Usefulness: Would the site be useful for you if you planned to buy cloud server? What should be added, what is irrelevant? Is the missing thing crucial enough to prevent me from going further?

2. Ease of use: Is it simple enough to understand it without explanation?

3. Name: I’m not a native English speaker, so it is difficult for me to judge how a name sounds for natives and if it easy to remember. The other top candidates were cloudcruncher.com and cloudcomparator.com . Huge advantage for cloudorado.com is that there are virtually no results in Google for that. Which would you choose?

4. Business model – I mostly plan to earn on cloud providers’ affiliate programs or charge per click. Which of those you think would be better? Any other ideas?

Obviously I don’t think the service is done now, but hopefully something like alpha would apply. Therefore feedback is really critical at this point and I really appreciate any comments. I hope it will save me some dead ends.

Thank you!

Marcin

As I'm looking to do this sort of comparison right now, this is a timely find for me.

I like the way the basic mode works and gets straight to the point.

A few points that occur to me, but they're all just cosmetic things..... The slider for linux/windows could be a radio control, it would be more fitting for the options.

You can't tell what you're choosing with the CPU power slider, I'd put marker on the slider such as .25 .5 1 2 etc and label that as '* 1 Xeon E5520 etc'

Why are the bandwidth and subscription hidden in accordions? If it's just to keep the results table from being pushed too low you could recapture that space by removing the text from the dark blue gradient area, the second line is fairly redundant info and the "Cloud Computing Comparison Engine" could happily sit above the top menu almost flush with the top of the page.

When you expand the details for an item in the results list it's very difficult to read. As it is in an expanded element you can afford to get some extra white space in there. Pop a bit more of a margin round the tables, and add a bit of css so the column widths are the same for each result row, which will make it easier to compare details of results.

Very good points! I'll just comment on bandwidth and subscription, while rest goes straight on my todo list. The idea was it will be less used than other settings and I didn't want to scare people with too many settings at first ... and it was scary with 7 sliders. So at first I've just put the used values, but later did the expanding panel. Will see how many people really use it. I'm just worry not to overload it. I remember when I saw EC2 calculator for the first time - I felt really overwhelmed.

Edit: By "used values" I mean bandwidth values that where used for calculation. They were to be static. So later I came up with this solution to be somewhere in the middle.

Good point. I know what exactly what you mean about the Amazon calculator, first time I saw it I said to myself "This is the simple one?"

Clickable link: http://www.cloudorado.com/

I think this site would be useful for developers trying to choose web hosting. I think some more information that could be added is what programming languages and plugins they support. Also, it would be nice if you could do something similar for cloud datastores. Finally, it might just be me but I wasn't sure whether or not I was going to a real page so some graphic design tweaks might be helpful. All in all, I think it's useful.

Thanks. This generally seems like a bit direction into Platform as a Service, which I will defenitely need to go. That is Google Apps Engine / Windows Azure space. Though the border between IaaS and PaaS is getting blurred, since IaaS providers give more and more platform services, while PaaS are going into IaaS as well (Azure now has VM role in beta).

Yeah I agree, I didn't even think of them as IaaS because I'm so used to Heroku and other PaaS now that I assume the other ones are too. My bad. Maybe having a separate tab/page for PaaS would be helpful?

PaaS is much more difficult to compare in price terms, since they completely different pricing models and are difficult to translate. So at first I was thinking to address PaaS as finding tool - so you choose what language and components you need and you get a list of providers, but without prices, at least at first. Do you think it would be good enough for start?

Yeah that alone would be really helpful. I think that's a great place to start

Very nice! Regarding the logo though, it needs to be rotated a few degrees counter-clockwise, so that the text is symmetrical to an imaginary x'x axis that splits it in half. This is because implicitly it is now pointing downwards, which people subconsciously relate to, you know, bad things.

Disclaimer: IMHO. Not trying to offend anyone. Etc.

Edit: I would also like to say that i find the name excellent. It conveys the point very well, you should not change it.

I think this is a very worthwhile problem to solve. However...

I don't think the basic premise of the interface is very helpful. Having to dial in an exact configuration to get any information is very cumbersome, and requires the user to scan the parameters and take notes to get an idea of what the tradeoffs are.

In particular, the way service providers disappear from the results when a configuration they don't support is entered creates more questions than answers to the user. When I enter a few configurations with no result for Rackspace, I think "why don't you just TELL ME what Rackspace supports."

I know you have many dimensions of data to deal with, so a more complex visualization is difficult, but it will be worth it if you can work it out. I would recommend looking at Edward Tufte's books.

You may also find Tableau software's free web visualization software useful. It solves this basic problem although I have never used it so I can't say if it works well.

Actually I didn't thought it may cause such problem. Interesting. Actually when I think of it right now, I somehow realized that the controls have two purposes - one is setting parameters for calculation and second is filtering if criteria is not met. This in deed might not be obvious.

Just a quick thought - would dropping a provider down the list + dash instead of price + stating "provider does not support this configuration" instead of server summary. Probably a limiting resource should be also mentioned. Would it make it?

After giving a second thought I think it is not something what you are asking for. You would like to have a way to have quick look to visual price lists, without filling in anything. Something like multidimensional graph.

I am working on a tool for UI/UX crit. It might be useful here. This is a link for a crit for your site's landing page:

  http://www.userexperiencereview.com/reviews/cloudorado-com/interfaces/landing

Very interesting! I like it :-) Do you have community of critics already? I would much more like to review such things with larger community rather than several people I can ask.

The site has been live for just around a week- so I am working on it. Soon, I hope! Feel free to append the Uxreview link to your post, to get all the hn crit consolidated on one review at Uxreview- hope that's not too presumptuous. Cultivating a community of insightful design and product people is my biggest goal right now. First on the list is a better landing page, right after that a latest/interesting activity page.

Hey, that's really slick!

You should do a "Show HN" with that site.

(FWIW I like the layout of the individual review pages but the home page seemed cluttered/hard to follow.)

Hey, thanks! I am holding off... for just the reason you brought up. Am cooking up an onboarding/landing experience. Am very much looking forward to a show hn. Thx so much for the encouragement.

This is a nice idea - I definitely have a use for something like this.

Feature request: something I routinely find myself calculating/re-calculating is which provider will give me the most CPU/RAM/bandwidth/storage per dollar.

For example, I may not care how my individual boxes/instances are configured. It makes no difference to me whether I have one instance with 16GB of RAM or 16 instances each with 1GB of RAM...as long as there is a total of 16GB RAM in my cluster, and I'm paying as little as possible.

This especially applies to bandwidth.

Nice. Something like list of cheapest providers in a given resource. Goes for my list :)

BTW. Check the advanced mode - it has an option to distribute resources - just select "distribute" checkbox. It will find the cheapest option for that - it may then split over multiple servers if it is cheaper. One thing to remember though - it will always try to distribute on servers of the same type. Sometimes it would be better to have N boxes of type X and then one box of another type. I don't have it.

Interesting. Your tool confirmed what I already knew: compared to dedicated colocated hardware, cloud servers are 10 times more expensive, at least in my specific case.

This is somehow expected in fact. If you buy a server, it has 100% allocation. With cloud by definition you need to have servers underallocated to be able to deploy more servers at any time. Actually I think that some kind of hybrid hosting is a good choice - dedicated or colocated servers for the constant load + cloud servers for bursts. Only few providers have such options.

My two cents:

* Cloudorado is a "cute" name but a bit of a mouthful to type/remember the spelling of.

* The other name options are a little generic but of the two I think Cloudcruncher.com has the lead.

I agree. Cloudcruncher is more memorable (alliterative and catchy) and relevant to the site's purpose (number crunching for cloud services).

[Cloudorado sounds more like the place SV telecommuters live. ;)]

I like the meaning when you think of an analogy between number cruncher and cloud cruncher. But cloudorado gives about 240 results in Google (this post is already on top). Cloud cruncher, if written with space, gives 2 mln results - it will be difficult to go through. Wouldn't it change a balance for you?

From what I can see there's not really much in the way of exact matches for "cloud cruncher" with two words so I don't think it would take much to get near the top of results.

In fact there's a whois record for your cloudcruncher.com domain in the first page of results. :)

Minor: what's the difference between a cloud provider and a VPS provider? I could rent a VPS and do something uncloudlike with it.

I'd like to specify a budget amount, and see what the offers are at that price point. The use case is something like "I know what $20 gets me on Linode, how does that compare to $20 at the other providers?"

To be honest I don't think there is a sharp division line between VPS or IaaS. They at least intersect. If you try to differentiate, usually you will find definitions that VPS is more like dedicated server, just that it is virtual. So they have the same pricing model - longer term (at least month), pay in advance, often not automatically provisioned. In IaaS you are are charged per actual use, usually in hour intervals. You have API to automatically create new or shut down instances when needed (scale up and down) ... and theoretically you have infinite computing resources available.

I think making the sliders a bit larger and centered on the page would help, and though I do like "cloudorado", it's a bit hard to spell. Maybe playing around with misspellings like "clouddorado" or abbreviations like "cloudr" could work.

looks cool, for price comparison this is awesome. But, me and probably most serious people will prefer actual users reviews & benchmarks over prices comparison.

- where is slicehost? - not working on opera.

Seems like combining with benchmarks & review is something for of priority! This was first thing mentioned also on #startups channel. Thank you.

At this stage I'm far from covering all IaaS providers. There are at least 50 of them currently. But I'll keep adding new. I'll put slicehost on top then :)

SmartGWT seems to have a bug with sliders for Opera. Something with z-index I think.

Interesting site, didn't get to play in too much detail but I got hung up on the OS slider -- maybe make this a radio or some sort of toggle since it's only 2 selection items?

I know - two item selection with slider is not natural, but I wanted to keep one style. Don't know what is better - one style or a more natural widget.

I hear you on that one -- my engineering degree trained me to like 90-degree angles and consistency =p Not sure of a way to keep it consistent and make it natural...there must be a UI pattern somewhere!?!? My go to would be to browse jQuery UI and YUI Widgets...ha

I think I will be replacing the SmartGWT widgets with something else, due to big download size caused by that library. SmartGWT was main contributor to the slow page start. It might be a right time to review other widget options :-) But I'll definitely try the radio buttons for OS.

When I slide to 512MB on the RAM slider, incorrect linode plan is shown.

Edit: Ditto for 256.

I noticed this as well, but it could be because of the disk space specified. Bigger drives = bigger RAM instances.

Exactly. If you changed only RAM, then default was 20 HDD, while Linode 512 has only 16 GB.

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