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Comment by jakewalker | Hacker News Reader

I particularly like this nugget:

> Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.

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What if the person doesn't know exactly what it is that they need? I know a lot of people who know software but aren't as solid on knowing how to scale the hardware side. For those people a table isn't really helpful.

That said however, it should be an option to have that access. I personally prefer Joyent as a web host. They've shown really solid I/O numbers via their benchmarking. I've been a happy customer since it was TextDrive.

I don't think a salesman is the first person you want to talk to to help you in this regard.

This is actually a sad state of affairs. It used to be that the salesperson was exactly the kind of guy who could solve this. Now they're just too busy padding deals with stuff almost everyone knows you don't need.

It's a top-down problem. If the company's executives are pushing salespeople to work in the 1990's-era enterprise sales model, you get websites with zero useful information and a phone number for upselling.

That's kind of what I was trying to say. The fact that "sales" is so bent on selling you stuff instead of getting you the right stuff for what you're trying to do instead is a problem.

In those scenarios, what you need is a systems engineer, not a sales representative. Sales guys generally don't know anything more than the price sheet and the available inventory.

> Quick quiz: can your entire sales staff be replaced by a nicely formatted HTML table? If the answer is 'yes', then you are subtracting value and wasting my time.

If they don't know what they need, then the answer to the above question is 'no', and hence doesn't apply. In that case, you might consider asking the provider to recommend what sort of setup "solution" you require. But I wouldn't want to do that through a sales guy, especially someone working on commission. I'd rather get some advice from a disinterested 3rd party (even if it's just asking on StackOverflow/ServerFault or whatever) and then look for suppliers offering what I need.

There's a distinct audience for the sales reps - likely more on the business or procurement side. Any good provider will have sales engineers who can speak to the technology side and the impact technology has on the business or financials of the overall hosting engagement.

A multi-person model is structured around larger enterprises that already have separate staff representing these different roles.

I second your Joyent recommendation. An article of mine made it to the top of Hacker News' frontpage - said article is hosted on one of their SmartMachines w/only 256megs of RAM… running blogging software I had written myself. And it held up fine!

To fit within the confines of that amount of RAM, though, I've since switched to nginx… :)

Yea. I have two SmartMachines through them. One of the now unavailable 512mb machines and a 1gig. I've been pretty happy with both of them. There are certainly ways they could improve but it's clear that Solaris Zones as a way to do virtualization isn't going to show the same level of performance degradation as a typical virtualization setup.

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