Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"I already run my own UnrealIRC daemon, on Linode, for $20/mo with however many users it can handle."

Then I would argue you're not the target market. I'm a tech company CEO. I have WAY better things to do than set up an IRC server, even though my background is Linux system administration. My employees (we have 8 people currently; hiring #9) also have better things to do (like, you know, features our customers want :)

So we use Hipchat. And Hipchat rocks. Everyone on our team loves it. (We actually tried grove first, but it just wasn't mature enough for our needs--Hipchat has Mac OS, Windows, web, Android, AND iPhone apps, and we're all on different platforms, so that works out well.)

When you're paying developers $$$, you don't want them to be setting up IRC servers. Better to use a Hipchat or a Grove.io and be up and running in 5 minutes with clients on every device. For us, it's well worth the few $ a month to have one less thing to set up and maintain.

"When you're paying developers $$$, you don't want them to be setting up IRC servers."

Fair enough but still if it takes 1 hour to set it up vs paying 50$*12. (But I get your point, that's why I said I found it a bit risky in another post.. that's the developers mentality vs the CEO's one.)

You are forgetting to factor in maintenance costs, so yes, absolutely the developers perspective.

I don't think you can realistically setup an IRC server in an hour, at least not your first time, not with SSL, NickServ, ChanServ, etc. It will probably take more than an hour just to pick an IRC server and find the documentation. Almost all IRC servers were designed to run public IRC networks, each public IRC network has forked and re-forked the original IRCd from 1988. They tend to lack features that are expected of online services these days, e.g., user accounts and access controls. You can usually set a server-wide password, and channel keywords, but that's different than having individual usernames and passwords, with individual access control to channels. So then you need a NickServ and ChanServ, which are separate from the IRC daemon. Then the logging bot, and the web archive of the logging, and access control to the web archive. And a web client so you can easily invite first-timers into a discussion. It's way more than an hours work. Then you are paying $20/month to Linode, and someone has to maintain it with security updates, and backups, and documentation on how to redo all the configuration. That's a lot of time when you could just pay $50/month to Grove. $50/month is one regular coffee a day, it's not much money.

I'm not saying that Grove is not a good idea (It is actually!), I'm just a little afraid how the product targets a niche that are used to hack/configure things themselves. And, don't forget that developers enjoy hacking or setting up these kinds of server.

But yeah, I do agree with you that from a CEO point of view, it's not worth to waste time on this as there are already existing solutions.

FWIW, Hipchat's pricing is $2/month/user (so $16 for our 8 people), and Grove's is $25/month for up to 10 people. Not sure where you're getting $50. And yeah, for what we need, it'd take a lot more than an hour to set up. Not to mention explaining to our non-technical staff members how to set up an IRC client. That's why we picked Hipchat.

I call balogna; it probably takes longer to go through the purchase / registration process for a service like this than it does to fire up your own IRC server on one of your available boxes.

If you know the available packages. And get really lucky.

For most people who haven't done it much before, will have to do some research first, and probably end up shaving yaks for a bit.

Grove (I'm honored, by the way) seems like a nice middleground. Make the busy founders happy (easy, no maintenance), make the devs happy (irc).

Actually, we're a tech (consulting) company and we don't even have our own box any more. We do have access to some fully managed boxes, but alas, grove.io is cheaper than having an admin set up and maintain an irc server for us. We joined the moment the offering came up.

Skype works pretty well for small teams too. One advantage is you can bring customers into the chat seamlessly if they already have a skype account.

Not to mention any IRC network (EFnet, Freenode etc) with TLS/SSL support. At least if you're not discussing things like missile launch codes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com