What does "the msft dude for YC" mean?
But dear god, the XML! They've started making more and more stuff code-configurable though, so that's good.
And it's pretty expensive.
Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.
Nice blanket statement there. How can you claim it's expensive when you have no idea what or how he uses it?
The most cost effective way as far as I can see is to hire a sysadmin on a freelance basis until you need one full time, own your own hardware (or lease it by the month until you can afford your own hardware) and pay flat rate for bandwidth. Anything else will sooner or later come to haunt you and then you will need to migrate to some new platform. At that point in time you will learn the true value of the words 'lock-in'.
Obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but for a straightforward SaaS app (a few servers, a db server, a queue and a load balancer in a few datacentres around the world) one good sysadmin/devops guy costs far more than a set of AWS instances that essentially scale themselves.
Having dedicated people necessary for that 'control' is beyond the budget of the majority of startups.
The choice is definitely not between going for a cloud platform versus hiring a bunch of people full time. There are other options.
There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility afforded by cloud providers to increase the number of instances temporarily to deal with the peak makes sense.
I think there is a case for an open stack, but I think unless you pick a real dog of a platform good people can make it work well. It comes down to a "can I get good people for stack X?" as much as "Does stack X work or cost too much?"
Stackoverflow and Trello are always held up as the shining examples of how the Microsoft stack is able to hold its own. That's great, I even know people that insist on running their web servers on Apple hardware. Whatever floats your boat. But if you're running a competitive business, if you're going to be using a lot of CPUs and if you will eventually (or already) be faced with lean and mean competition then you are probably better off on an open stack.
Try to imagine Google, Amazon, Ebay, DropBox or AirBnB on the Microsoft platform. And note that two of the above are re-selling their linux based platforms to other users at a profit.
Btw stackoverflow uses plenty of CentOS, I guess licensing from RedHat was too expensive?
Microsoft aren't stupid - the costs they charge for Azure are largely competitive, and the benefits it provides are tangible.
Picking what technology will run your business is something that really needs to be done on a case by case basis, based on your knowledge and your business. Certainly I don't think it's desirable to make a permanent choice when you are still a startup.
Of course you'd use CentOS, unless you had need of the specific features that licensing it gave you.
We're definitely in agreement there. The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it.
So, would it be fair to say "So if you're comfortable using the Linux stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it", or was that your parting jab against MS?
On top of that, SO's search feature is (IMHO) loads better than Reddit's.
Certainly, a silicon valley company of 10-20 employees will likely have costs of over $1000 a day - any software or hardware licensing will pale in comparison to this until the product is big.
Also, we don't have to worry about managing VMs at all so we don't generally think about those sorts of things except for a couple of very niche uses like our chat bot or QA testing VMs.
From another post by you: >Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable.
Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening?
Otherwise I am going to call BS on it.
Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.
All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know.
It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
When you take off, you can raise money to pay people to move you over anyway.
I really wished that companies like Microsoft, Google and so on would not have a 'HN guy' (and would not have non-disclosed HN guys either, Felix is at least above board on that), it can make it a lot harder to figure out what is a genuine user experience and what is product placement.
Unless the Microsoft stack is something you already have experience with you're much better off using non-proprietary stack software. Anything coming out of Microsoft will sooner or later cause a bunch of licenses to be sold somewhere down the line or monthly invoices for metered usage to appear so make sure you know exactly what you're getting into. $50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
Small business usually get everything for free (or nobody bothers to check in on their licensing status, at the very least, they run on a massive discount using "developer editions").
Very large businesses have so much bureaucratic overhead, that unless their core business is Software/service (I.E. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc...) - the cost of software licenses is minor, and anything they can save by going with something "Standard and Supported" is worth the offset.
But, anybody interested in trying to run their small-medium business on something like Oracle Enterprise edition on their 16 Core Server will quickly start taking a second look at Postgress/MariaDB once they see what the annual licensing costs for Oracle are. Partitioning and Optimizer are only worth so much...
To the best of my knowledge, no-one who bought the Zune ended up paying $50k to MS for it.
The regular Bizspark is 100USD/month.
Hint: HN is a message board, YC is a startup accelerator. They are NOT the same. And yes, there are plenty of startups that do quite okay on the MS stack and for many it may not be a good fit. Your post adds nothing new to the discussion.
>It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products to give it a try through free product samples, and talking down companies not microsoft.
But luckily we have you to talk down Microsoft.
>$50K in freebies will have to translate into $50K more profit somewhere along the line.
And paying $50K for hosting when you have no money can just shutdown a startup instead of increasing its costs by 1% down the line. Hosting is the biggest cost for a startup most of the time, it can't be "free" like founders time.
Anyway, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band?
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ntakasaki
Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN, YC related founder or not they are better off using what is most cost effective for them. This will rarely translate to 'microsoft'.
Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
$50K for hosting through 'Azure' or some other cloud company typically translates into a few grand from a dedicated hosting provider, by far the most cost effective hosting solution available to start-ups and successful companies alike.
Thanks for not making this personal.
Felix said he's the MS person for YC. You misrepresented it as HN a couple of times. Please read your post again.
>Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.
But we do have you to counterbalance me.
>Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.
What? What is the biggest cost for a startup in the initial phase when founders are not taking salaries? Rent for sleeping? Ramen noodles? Which large company has the biggest cost as hosting? Even 50k/yr is like 1/3rd of a Silicon level salary. It's like you got it completely backwards.
Anyway, all this unrelated to the topic at hand and does not belong here. There were numerous HN threads with this discussion and please write your thoughts as a blog post and you'll have my upvote.
Again, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band? If not, /thread, I am out.