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Comment by Goopplesoft | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely curious how you guys come up with pricing for the stacks. I understand the convenience premium with the webhost/scaling services like heroku and dotcloud, I buy into that too. But I fall off where say a 1Gb mongodb comes out to $134 monthly, especially considering its almost effortless to set such a db up (fire up ec2 instance, download, ./mongod).

Essentially I am asking: If you were trying to sell me your product how would you justify the $132 for 1Gb mongodb when I can get a 1.7Gb instance at amazon for a fraction of the price ($46, on demand).

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The thing with PaaS vs EC2 is that you're hiring a whole 24/7 Ops team and have a whole layer of software on top of the infrastructure you would have used to ease scalability, failover, load balancing, etc. All these things go into keeping your application live. Sure it's not a nightmare to figure out how to setup your own mongo on a VPS, but as you grow and need that high availability and uptime, your sleep will decrease dramatically (nightly alerts at 2, 3, and 4am? Yeah they hurt..) or need to hire sysadmin(s) to take care of that for you, you realize the difference in monthly cost versus the $100k+ engineers becomes much, much sweeter.

Yeah but none of this is really advertised on the main site. The only thing mentioned in the docs thats different from just ./mongod is the easy scaling: http://docs.dotcloud.com/0.9/services/mongodb/

As I said I totally understand the whole sysadminless thing, and I definitely see it's usefulness. However, none of what you're saying is even advertised/mentioned by them (at least based on my quick search)...

From the dotcloud.com home page:

We keep your app running 24/7 with built-in load-balancing, monitoring and failover. Scale in seconds to handle surges in traffic - and only pay for what you need.

It is admittedly below the fold, and they should probably replace its position on the page with their customer success stories, but they at least do try to tell you what they do.

I'm a fan of AppFog's pricing model. They charge more in the vicinity of $25/GB.

A more apt comparison would be to MongoHQ I suspect. It still reinforces your argument, as a 5Gb MongoHQ hosted database is also on Amazon for $149 a month.

I love DotCloud to pieces, but use them selectively. The real key to this question is how much you value the convenience and super scalability of it. For me, I would much prefer having my code on Dotcloud if only because it integrates with Github, can be pegged to a particular branch, and is super super scriptable (so that you can have a repository invoke a webhook that deploys your code to Dotcloud, for example.)

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