Fluxflex: GitHub integrated cloud hosting, starting at $1/month | Hacker News Reader

Fluxflex: GitHub integrated cloud hosting, starting at $1/month

fluxflex.com

52 pointsiamclovin62 comments

Your prices are too low.

I don't think so. But if you think so, just pay $1/month to support us! Thanks in advance!

We want to give you more money. It also gives you a little more legitimacy to an already impressive product.

As the great patio11 said[1]: Charge more. Nothing uber crazy since you have to compete with the likes of Github and others you're competing with, but $1 sounds a little ridiculous. But maybe that's part of the gimmick ;)

Great stuff, keep it up!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=641545

I totally agree. My first thought was that I want to give you more money than that (as it would give me more confidence in the product). Either that or lower your plan limits a fair bit. Also, if you have a free plan then you are unlikely to scare people off with higher pricing - they can always just try the free plan and see how great the product is, and it is easier to lower prices than raise them :)

Well, it appears the certificate is invalid on https (which is what this item linked to), and no content on http. :(

Same here

I'm the founder of fluxflex, and am willing to answer any questions. Fluxflex now supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, Node.js and Haskell. We'll support additional languages in near future.

How would this compare to something like Django Zoom? Can you give some background as to how you came up with your service and the goals of it?

Hi Andrian. We bring the power of social coding (GitHub) into a cloud hosting platform (fluxflex), and I believe the multi-language support is critical point to achive it. Taking advantage of social knowledge and cllaboratoin with other developers will reduce initial learning curves for trying new technologies, and will amplify the joyful energy instead. Our goal is to let the web application development faster, easier and more amusing.

Now you can install various popular applications with one-click. These applicatoins include Rails, Node.js, Coffee script, Django, Catalyst, Mojolicious, Lokka, Haskell and so on. Because we use GitHub on its backend, you can access to the source code easily, and fork it to start developing your original applications.

On ther other hand, if you have an existing repository on GitHub, you can automate the deployment process by specifying the reposity in a form on fluxflex.

As the result of these collaborations, I believe web applications development will become more pleasant.

I think you will succeed. But you can charge $2.

A few things regarding the pricing page - firstly, the text underneath the 'Quota' box makes little to no sense to a native English speaker. I cant even offer a translation myself, whcih I would be happy to do, since I don;t understand what you are trying to say.

Secondly, alot of your pricing package details are in very small fractions of GB. It would be easier for people to make comparisons, and thus realise you may be cheaper, if you used megabytes instead, no?

Thnaks for your comment.

At first, we are in the process of refine the phrases on the Web with some native English speakers, and will clarify the description soon.

Second, we just use GB instead of MB because we will increase the free quota in future. Current quota is for temporal use to avoid paying too much unexpected infrastructure cost.

Thanks for your advice.

That is not a good enough reason not to use MB. You can always change the M to a G later.

I think you charge too little to assure serious users that you will be around in the future.

Kei, I've just installed the node_sample "Hello World!" project on the free plan, and noticed it was running a bit slow. Apache bench shows an avg of 1471ms/req over 100 requests (from NJ). Do you provide faster response-times on the other plans? Where are the data-centers located?

We are based on Amazon Web Services (ELB + EC2 + nginx + powerdns + apache + FastCGI). I admit the current response time is very slow, but our team members make a lot of effort to improve it.

It may be the different issue, but some node hackers may disagree to use Node.js with Apache + FastCGI. However, it is our challenge to make the node technology available not only to geeks but also to light users who will take advantage of server side javascript.

We'll improve the performance and I welcome any advices!

I would humbly suggest that you drop ELB in favor a software based solution that you control like haproxy. ELB just isn't up to the job unless you are a really big customer of Amazon's.

Also, if you are using small or micro instances, you probably don't want to do that either. Don't use anything less than a large instance if you want even semi-decent performance.

Thanks for your advice. I think chnaging load balancers to 64-bit instances is the first thing I should do. And also I heard several times about the performance of ELB, so we will change our architecture to some alternatives.

So incredibly pedantic, but since it's better than no one telling you: typo on https://www.fluxflex.com/about, "Share you applications with one click" header

Otherwise, looks pretty damn cool. Definitely will watch this :)

edit: also, under that header, "applicatoins" in the second bullet

Also "Statictics"

What NPM (NodeJs) modules do you support? How does one enable them?

So it's nearlyfreespeech.net but with semi-persistent workers like Heroku?

I agree that the pricing is too low for you to make money on top of AWS and also deliver decent service, it's hard to imagine that you could stick around — at the very least you should emphasize how developers don't end up tied into your platform.

site seems hacked, and now down. Anyone one else seeing that?

It's down for me.

The SSL certificate is for "redirector.zerigo.net", and is self signed. If I add an exception to my browser I get through, but all I get is a completely blank page and a 404 status code.

Is anyone seeing an actual website at the moment?

Clicking on this link brings up some sort of cert error in mobile Safari. Just FYI.

It's fixed. Thanks for the report. :)

Still there on Chrome/Mac OS

Also still there on Chromium/Ubuntu 11.04

On Firefox, Ubuntu 11.04. Doesn't work even after I accepted the cert.

Still a problem on safari (iOS)

No it's not: your hostname is wrong, and your cert is self-signed.

Check https://www.wormly.com/test_ssl/h/www.fluxflex.com/i/64.27.5...

It seems that root of the domain fluxflex.com is redirected to www.fluxflex.com, and fluxflex uses zerigo DNS Redirect to do it. That's the problem.

For avoiding the error, please access to www.fluxflex.com, not fluxflex.com. We'll fix this issue soon.

The link I posted goes to www.fluxflex.com, not fluxflex.com

Both are broken in the same way.

Hmm, it seems weird. We just use zerigo.net as our external DNS nameservers, and it has some relations with this current issue.

I should investigate the problem deeper.

So it looks like the problem was that you updated your DNS but forgot about TTLs. Your new cert has the correct name on it, but you didn't setup the cert chain properly (SSLCACertificateFile under Apache)

https://www.wormly.com/test_ssl/h/50.16.245.9/i/50.16.245.9/...

You are right. We changed our frontend from Django+Apache to Rails+Nginx, and we forgot to specify the certificate chain in nginx config file. Now I added the description, and confirmed that we can access to the web site via SSL.

Hum no. Still having issues with Chrome + OSX.

Check your certificates with "openssl s_client -showcerts -connect www.fluxflex.com:443"

Moreover, even ignoring SSL issues, i get an empty page.

Ubuntu 11.04 Google Chrome - ssl error and blank page.....

still not fixed

This is actually really cool. Its the kind of thing I've been really wanting to get the Cloud9 guys to get working with dotcloud. A huge stumbling block for me has been working on my CR-48. Dotcloud, heroku need you to install their CLI witch will obviously give you much more power and flexibility but cant be done if you don't have terminal access.

Now some will say why would you even try to do any kind of dev work without proper tools but I think this really lowers the bar and gives people another frictionless way to get their hands dirty.

How do you separate each customer's application inside your cloud stack?

You let people run shell scripts on deployment, is this why your service is down? Seems reminiscent of phpfog's mistake of running post-deploy scripts for users as root.

Seriously, why do you need so many rights to my twitter account!!? i don't think that's necessary...

Also: got a 500 error on signup (via email/password)

When I visit on iPad it says it cannot verify the identity of your server... May want to look into that to increase customer confidence.

The certificate is fine here.

The same result on an iPhone.

also getting a cert error - when i proceed anyway i get no content on the page. I'm on OSX, running Google Chrome.

Same behavior here, using Iceweasel (Firefox) 5 on Debian GNU/Linux.

After approving the self-signed cert, i just see a blank page. I'll check back later, this sounds interesting.

EDIT: I Haven't tried it yet, but it looks pretty awesome if it works as advertised.

How does it work? How does it handle configuration and installation?

You can write a configuration file named .flx and we will run commands according to the description in it. "Lokka on fluxflex" is a greate example for understanding how the configuration and the deployment work on fluxflex. You can read the source code at https://github.com/sowawa/lokka.

Various one-click install applications are hosted on GitHub, and you can fork, merge and push on GitHub as well as just install the application on fluxflex.

I hope that shell script is properly jailed.

Typo here: https://www.fluxflex.com/registrations

"Regsiter"

Followed by 500 internal error

Service demo video is available at http://youtu.be/qm15rItQ-w0

I just deployed a project to layar.fluxflex.com.. It says it's deployed, but I get a 404. Any ideas?

Very cool, how does it work with custom domains? Couldn't find anything on the site about that.

Just got a 500 when I signed up... but it went through anyways and took me to my account page.

I got that too

I can't open the site on Chrome nor Safari.

Any plans for postgres?

I will just repeat it: your prices are too low.

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