Review my startup, mist.io - mobile friendly cloud management/monitoring | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup, mist.io - mobile friendly cloud management/monitoring

mist.io

21 pointsunweb24 comments

My opinion: you've asked for feedback on this a bit too early. It's really hard to review your startup before the product, pricing, or even a demo is available. I do think CloudKick and more recently Cloudability have proved there's some merit to this idea. How is Mist.io different? How is it better?

CloudKick is no longer available to new users. Mist.io is mobile friendly, supports private clouds & the monitoring agent will be released as free/open source software.

Agree. All you can really ask for is feedback on the landing page not your startup. For all I know you're in the first stages of determining whether there's enough interest in this to pursue it.

No demo, no screenshots, and no real list of features/things your app does. Why, as an ops guy with a trillion other services with these items available, would I sign up for this?

Feel free to add at least screenshots, as that definitely would help pique my interest.

The initial feature set is that you'll be able to create/destroy/tag/reboot and send arbitrary ssh commands to your VMs from your phone, tablet or laptop at no cost. Monitoring and sms/email alerting will be available for a small fee.

We're still working on the user interface so we're not quite ready to publish screenshots yet. Check back soon!

I'd like to see more on the main page about pricing. You mentioned "Both the core service and the monitoring agent will be Free Software" but is there a charge for the service?

On a side note... This is a great idea, I am the founder of http://ratemystartup.com - If you would like to submit your startup there I should be able to get you up on the site quickly.

Thank you. We will definitely submit it.

There will be a small monthly charge per VM after enabling monitoring & alerting. We're still working on the pricing policy.

Great, we'll look forward to that.

That definitely sounds fair. I would get that pricing page up as soon as possible, users always want to see that.

Done! We just submitted it on ratemystartup.com

All set, for a fellow HN reader we bumped you to the front of the queue. (currently about a 4-5 week backlog) http://ratemystartup.com/manage-and-monitor-your-virtual-mac...

Hopefully this gives you some additional well deserved exposure.

FYI, I run Chrome with the Better Pop Up Blocker extension, and when I first loaded your site I got nothing but a gray screen. I see "Uncaught TypeError: Property 'scrollTo' of object [object Window] is not a function" in the developer console.

We'll look into it, but it appears to be related to Better Pop Up Blocker http://code.google.com/p/betterpopupblocker/issues/detail?id...

For the time being, you could just check to see if window.scrollTo != null

Beautiful website. Good job explaining what it is.

I'd put a screenshot (or an approximate mockup) of the app inside the tablet, rather than the mist.io logo. Seems like a wasted opportunity of "a picture's worth a thousand words."

Looks pretty cool, are you using some cloud management platform's APIs underneath (like scalr, rightscale, enstratus etc)? Does it only support VMs? or can I attach my EBS volumes when I launch a new VM as well?

We're using libcloud as a unified interface to the EC2/RackSpace/OpenStack API's. We'll only support VMs at the beginning.

Don't really do much sys admin stuff anymore.

Re the copywriting: "Mobile friendly web app" sounds awkward.

Just say "straight from your mobile phone" or something similar.

Not sure how you are going to charge for monitoring when any competent devops manager will know how to use Nagios.

There are plenty of paid online services for monitoring - take Pingdom for example.

and boundary.com and several others, but none that allow you to address issues from your mobile phone.

That is a feature, not a lasting competitive advantage. What if you could address issues from your phone? Whats the barrier to entry to that?

Not much to review. Where is the demo or at least some screenshots?

We're working on it. Meanwhile we would like some feedback on the business perspective.

really interesting!

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