Next dotCloud – improved platform and pricing | Hacker News Reader

Next dotCloud – improved platform and pricing

next.dotcloud.com

19 pointsmikexstudios16 comments

If this is the same dotCloud I used to push to, the real value proposition are the friendliness represented in both the interface and the people behind it offering the most patient customer support a hopeless idiot like myself could wish for.

It's hard to promote that stuff, but dotCloud was far and away the most accessible PaaS at the time - and may still be.

It's not surprising that they're basing their tiers on it. it also looks like the Sandbox is back!

Maybe not exactly the same?

The Docker technology was a by-product of the dotCloud product, which spun-off to create the company Docker, Inc to focus on Docker. Docker Inc sold dotCloud to the Berlin-based company cloudControl.

This appears to be a facelift coming from the new leadership.

Also, www.dotcloud.com references next.dotcloud.com with this language:

"Take the new and improved dotCloud PaaS on Google Compute Engine for a test-drive."

Their old FAQ said that containers were pushed to AWS East, so it looks looks like this is one thing that has changed. Actually, yes, here are some details on the move from AWS to Google Compute Engine:

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/12/dotcloud-pro...

Thanks. At the time, it seemed like dotcloud was totally done, so this is weird to see it again.

Thanks for the compliment! I ran the dotCloud support group from 2012 until we sold the platform, and we tried very hard to be approachable. I also worked with the acquiring engineers and found them to be excellent. They're super nice, care deeply about creating an excellent PaaS, and they're very experienced at ops and running cloudcontrol.de in Germany. I felt completely comfortable turning my customers over to them, so I'm sure they'll keep living up to the support you've come to expect.

Stating all of the prices as "per 30 days" has a bad smell to it.

Why not state them as monthly if that was the intent?

Or why not state it as hourly or annually if the intent is to slice it that way?

The only reasons I can think to state it per 30 days is that there is a dark pattern for revenue optimization hidden in there. Don't be different for the sake of being different when it comes to pricing, especially on something where folks are trying to compare your pricing to competitors.

I also think the "meh" acronym for memory hours is pretty unfortunate given the negative connotations. "meh" is about the last thing you want people to associate with your service.

Prices are stated per 30 days to make them easier to evaluate. Since actual pricing is per use and even pro-rated to the second the numbers would be really small and not really helpful otherwise.

But only in September, April, June and November!

It's semi-common in the cloud space, although some just go ahead and use the word "month" anyway, and then in the fine print define a month as equalling 720 hours. Some of AWS's pricing calculators do that, for example.

Those prices are so ridiculous, how can they even compete with DigitalOcean?

I think they're more competing with the likes of heroku as opposed to digital ocean.

The "Shared" kind of machine, like MySQL make absolutely no sense in the pricing.

It's like they are trying to mark up a smart car as a Tesla S..

DO is a cloud vps. Thats it.

This is a Paas service, so it provides, so what it is providing is a computing platform or a SaaS stack.

If these are improved prices I'd hate to think what the original prices were.

With AWS getting so good now I can't see the appeal for anything like this in future - I've got a dedicated PostgreSQL RDS instances which effectively manages themselves (auto backups/updates), for much less than the prices their charging for their MySql instances.

Hm, I didn't realize that dotCloud was acquired after they switched to being Docker, Inc.:

http://blog.dotcloud.com/dotcloud-paas-joins-cloudcontrol

Hmm.

On their front page, all the way down on their page, there is a banner I presume lists prominent clients. Among those listed is Google Compute Engine.

Are they saying that Google Compute Engine runs on top of dotCloud? Or the public site that GCE runs on?

I can confirm the new Dotcloud runs on top of GCE

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