Hacker News Reader

Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

MongoHQ is awesome, and their control panel is hands down the best of the MongoDB PaaS, but their pricing is cost prohibitively expensive.

For example, you can get a 2 core, 2GB memory, 20GB of SSD backed storage from DigitalOcean for $20 a month. So, buying three VM's from Digital Ocean for a replica set is a total of $60 a month. Essentially the same thing at MongoHQ is $500 a month.

I completely understand that you pay more for using a PaaS, but that much more?

View on HN

(I'm one of the MongoHQ founders)

It's less about the hardware and more about the DBA service. Most companies shouldn't be spending engineering time setting up DBs and don't have the expertise to run them when they're "catastrophically successful". We do, know what the watch for, and have on call DBAs that respond to issues within about 10 minutes, 24x7.

You're also paying for backup, fulltime monitoring, and support - which, while not as nice as having a full time DB ops person on staff, is really nice. The MongoHQ guys have done seamless DB migrations for us and suggested architectural improvements, all with amazingly short response time. For now, we're happy paying them for that service.

I am going to echo mrkurt's sentiments on this one. The cost is really more about management and the ability to buy opportunity to scale without real friction, less about cost of backing services. In general thats what has made AWS so successful, and why PaaS is gaining in popularity. Granted its not always troublefree but for a large portion of the industry it alleviates a HUGE pain point which IMHO is worth its weight in gold.

Ultimately, MongoHQ are pros and you're paying for their time and expertise, I am pretty sure if you were going to buy consulting time from them it would cost a lot more than what they charge for their service.

With a username like "nodesocket", I assume you are not their target audience as you are just as comfortable rolling your own and getting your own 10gen support contract.

Actually I've used MongoHQ as well as MongoLab for development, but for http://commando.io it made sense to just purchase three virtual machines on Softlayer and setup MongoDB. Backups we quite easy as well, a few hours later we had a working bash script which stored backups locally, and well as synced them to S3.

This pricing is absolutely insane for anyone with a decent sized dataset. It'd cost about a quarter million dollars a year to store a terrabyte of data?!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com