Hosting disrupted – 1 second installs, forking apps, container-based | Hacker News Reader

Hosting disrupted – 1 second installs, forking apps, container-based

jumpstarter.io

53 pointsversusdotcom57 comments

So I decided to do some really quick math here. Assuming a 30 day month and 1 request per second average that is 2.5 million requests. I don't know everyone else but I build web apps not web pages and requests to my api alone would exceed that a month. And I'm hosting stuff on $20 linode boxes that handle that just fine, heck a free tier AWS server handles that. No amount of "Ease" can offset that pricing. I'm very curious as to what kinds of apps they envision hosting, or if you're planning on using this what kind of apps are you hosting?

There's two reasons: 1) Ease 2) Tech

Our ease is worth it. If you save 1 hour of work, you've made your money back — and probably have even more. And honestly; not everyone has the skills to build stuff on Linode. Quite often they want to focus on just working on the client's website.

Our tech is very impressive. We've got a great development team working hard on building a very robust system. Using us you'd find that.

I can understand what you're saying though. But I can guarantee we're a different experience and result than plain old AWS or a blank Linode box.

Appreciate the response. Certainly going to give it a go. I tweeted, but could you point me in the direction of your definition of a request?

Our request model is http requests. I'll try and make that clearer on the homepage.

Under pricing, it says '10 million visitors' in the copy. There's quite a difference between 10 million requests and 10 million visitors.

Thanks for that spot. We had our metrics labelled as visitors but felt it was too confusing. It's definitely requests. Will change it :)

Looks interesting but nothing on the site seems to answer my question: can I run node.js apps here? Flask? Or is it wordpress / PHP only?

Right now; no. We've got support in the works but we wanted to get the features tighter before we added another language. We use Node ourselves for our sites and it's important to us (and me) that we have it.

tl;dr very very soon! :)

"Right now; no." No to all mentioned languages/frameworks or only no to Node.js?

It's PHP only right this second. We have a branch for Node, but we have no ETA on when that'll be live. We want it as much as you guys; so soon :)

Happy to hear that, because disrupting using wordpress isn't disruptive enough for me ;)

Right now it's an easy win. There's a lot of people still using it and it fits nicely into our current user base. But we totally agree!

IWBNI the site actually said that. I combed the site for a while to understand which kind of application and framework I can use.

Impressive. It has been a long time since I signed up on any hosting plan just to give it a spin.

Something on the page convinced me somehow to try it out and 5 minutes later I am happily viming through SSH at some index.html in a html5 boiler plate. I suppose that is because there are no credit card required (important for me as I don't have, don't need and don't want one).

The set-up process was really smooth.

How do you usually pay for stuff online?

I rarely do. When I have to (or want to) I ask a relative or a close friend of mine. Usually my brother. I think in the last ten year I haven't made more than ten online purchases.

So... Not owning a credit cart isn't (for the moment) an inconvenience for me because I rarely need to use one and if I have to I can find someone to help me with it.

I pay my bills via the online banking system my bank set up though. I use a card (one issued by my bank to each of its clients that allows me to pay for stuff IRL or to retrieve cash from ATMs) with a little calculator-like device that churns out temporary authentication codes. This system only works with my bank though ; I can't use it to buy from online vendors[0]. But I don't think it qualifies as online purchases. It wouldn't let me buy hosting for instance :)

[0] there are some exceptions though. ie mobile company generates links that initiate a transaction I have to confirm via the calculator and by logging into my bank.

Hi, Creative Director of Jumpstarter here :) Feel free to ask any questions.

Tech stack?

http://jumpstarter.io/technical should answer a lot of your questions, however…

nginx, php, mariadb, etc. Everything highly polished :)

Awesome, very cool! It's fun to see what people come up with to solve certain problems. Good luck!

Thanking you kindly :)

magento?

It's on our request list. If we get a lot more then we'll add it as starter.

However, it's supported and you're welcome to run it :)

I think you should make your 4th package "Enterprise" rather than "Business" -- people spending that kind of money don't like to associate with 'business' folks.

Interesting point. We currently have a few people at that level, and we actually have always felt enterprise is a little bigger. But we'll have a think about this. Thanks! :)

For some reason I'm running into more and more symfony-based projects. I'd like to see that as a starter.

We'll add it to the list of requests! We're hoping to add a lot more soon. :)

What happens if I exceed my traffic? There's a large gap between FREE and $49.

We'll warn you before you get there. And if it happens, we'll give you a grace period and work with you on how we can find a solution so we're both happy.

A bit steep indeed.

A starter @ 15/20 quids would be reasonable.

Hiring in the near future ?

Feel free to send your resume jobs@jumpstarter.io

Looks neat, and using Ceph is exciting. But slightly unimpressed with claims of "zero latency" and suggesting infinite scaling of hosts!

Also, would like to know where the hardware is. Is it your own hosted in Stockholm? Multiple datacentres or just one?

The architecture page is great http://jumpstarter.io/technical but all these providers are for a 'Shared nothing' setup.

What would hosting like this - heroku style - look like for JVM-backed apps? E.g. written in Closure, Scala or plain old Java, where you want to persist stuff between requests?

I'm an early beta user. Your web app is run in a virtual machine. You can store stuff to disk, in memory or in your own database (the PHP container gives you a database per default). I am not sure what happens to stuff in RAM if they choose to migrate you to a new host machine, though.

This looks really cool and also impressive speed! I noticed when adding a custom (sub)domain it'd warn me about the domain not being registered. It does however seem to happily resolve to the site, so I'm happy!

Edit: Working now :) Also, mounting the folders over ssh feels very responsive and fast, great job.

Hey, I currently host ~10 low traffic PHP websites on a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet. So far it works well, even on peak days when my wordpress blog has gotten ~15k visitors. I would love to switch to your service for the sheer convenience it brings, however I'm hesitant to part with $50 every month for this. $10 or $15 for a 100k hits per month plan would be a no brainer though.

And a $0.0001/request pricing model would totally revolutionise hosting :-).

You seem to be able to clone whole projects to mass produce wordpress or other PHP projects..

Indeed! :) The idea is that you can create starters for your projects.

The use of Ceph is interesting. For what? VM images? (Disclaimer: I'm a GlusterFS developer.)

Also, I hope people who sign up realize that jumpstarter.io is posting to Twitter under their names. Blech.

It's actually not. People click a tweet button, then review and post their tweet. :)

Tried it, like it. Worried about how easy it is to create a site without any 'are you human' checks though. Isn't this going to create tonnes of bot sites?

This was a worry to us. It'd be a big detriment to us if that happened. We're trying to keep the user the priority, rather than nasty captchas. So we've got our own implementations. The moment we see bots, we'll switch our strategy. :)

300K/month requests can mean many different things

looks like the storage is on a different server than the application? is that the same for the db ?

300k http(s) requests.

Everything is super optimised, so don't worry about where things are. It's all been meticulously tested for speed. HOWEVER, they're separately on a Ceph cluster.

i can :

encode video, transform images, other cpu/memory/disk/bandwidth intensive tasks

on each of those requests...

It's your space, and your CPU time. It won't affect anyone else. However, every member is subject to fair usage. We'll do whatever we can to be accommodating but if you're maxing out the CPU all the time, then we'll negotiate on what we can do to help you keep running.

How does running of nightly cron jobs that email out once a day work in this plan?

It's not a feature implemented yet, but we're going to add it. We need to adapt it to our architecture and make it scalable.

What are the perks for founding members?

Right now, a badge. We're contemplating what exactly to give. I suspect there'll be discounts and special rewards in the future though.

A startups life is really given life by the early adopters. And we think we should recognise those people for believing in us :) Hopefully we can in this way.

$50 for a month for a personal website?

Thanks, but no.

Many websites. I use it for me and my clients too. :) Which works out really nicely.

Just a personal website would probably fit nicely into the Free plan :)

Or I could host it in S3 for ~$15/year.

Sure, you could. But there's a ton of differences as you can see. It depends if you want automatic vs manual. And if you got the time to do manual, then I get that. But it's all about saving the users time, so they can focus on the core parts.

Dropbox could all be hosted on S3, but the ease is worth it. Etc.

Please add flask!

We'll add it to our requests list but no ETA as of yet! :)

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