jeremyjarvis

Are they now actively planning on being evil?

I think the link is wrong, shouldn't it be: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29879851

Great idea. Kudos for going through with it, and then taking the time to write it up!

"The founders conferred. They were prepared to settle for Ryza.com, but suddenly Experiment.com was available. That’s like being engaged to a high school boyfriend only to learn that Brad Pitt is interested in dating you. Never in their wildest dreams did they consider that they could get a domain like that. What to do?"

Stick with the person you love, right. Yeah, tell Brad Pitt to take a hike. Yep, that's definitely the right thing to do. Aww, high school sweethearts. That's lovely. What a nice story.

Oh. Wait. Huh? you dumped high school sweetheart for that wally off of the Chanel ads?

Sigh, I suppose it was... "inevitable" (http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ)

I wonder what else they might need help deciding... Who should be the next CEO? What shall we have for lunch tomorrow? How clueless should we present ourselves online?

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I would urge you (from many years experience in a "previous life") to look for clients who understand the true value of what you offer. That's the only way the client will have "warm fuzzes" in the end and you'll have warm fuzzes plus a healthy business.

If at all possible, I would try and work in some sort of agile process, where the client is paying you by the hour but has absolute visibility into progress and choosing which features to prioritise. In many cases, they will enjoy the experience and insight dragging features around in a kanban board gives them.

Agreed. At the very least, invoice the client and issue a credit note against it, so that the client can see with their own eyes the actual cost. Then they might thank you for it.

The title is a bit "baity"/misleading. They were only advertising for Facebook "likes" - not clickthrus etc.

It should probably read, "We stopped advertising for likes on Facebook". To which we'd probably just nod or shrug.

btw the packages include a patch for a bug in rubygems 2.2.0 (https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/766). Other than that, they're stock upstream versions.

better and waaaay more flexible how? genuine question.

m2.4xlarge has 68.4 GB of RAM and costs more than 3 times as much per hour :)

Yeah - that's fair comment, we don't have the same breadth of products as AWS for sure. I agree absolutely that agility is what it's all about though.

@jjm both Brightbox and AWS have to give notice before increasing prices. Again, I maintain the hourly on-demand price is a fair comparison

Because it's not a common unit for comparison. The spot price can fluctuate. Obviously.

(you edited your comment, so I'll edit mine :) ...

How can you assume the spot price will stay the same?

This is clearly a comparison of on-demand instances, where the common unit is the hourly rate as with other IaaS. Reserved instances in themselves have a cost in terms of commitment or risk (if you aren't able to sell them back later).

They're open source benchmarks, try them yourself if not convinced :)

Be interested to know how you did this tbh. Pretty sure EC2 doesn't let you map multiple elastic IPs to an instance afaik?

Oops, dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3306361

Oh, why not: http://jeremyjarvis.co.uk/grabs/d28dbe268c98efd6369e5813.png

Noooo. They seriously only give 2 weeks holiday a year? that's insane.

> Are you guys using local disks or SAN?

No SANs, anywhere! :)

> Are you guys using Eucalyptus?

It's our own stack. Eucalyptus afaik doesn't handle zones as geographically distinct datacentres and, when we looked at it a long time ago, had some pretty worrying SPOFs.

> Why is your outbound data more expensive then?

Transit is symmetrical, and incoming bandwidth is less utilised compared to outgoing so we charge less for it.

> How are you securing KVM?

In what sense?

(Co-founder at Brightbox)

@tastybites: a /little/ bit more to it than that ;) we do run the loadbalancing layer across multiple locations which is non-trivial.

[Disclosure: I'm co-founder at Brightbox]

Patrick - negligible, it's all on the same network.

[Disclosure: I'm co-founder at Brightbox]

"To top that off, Salesforce just bought Heroku, telling the world that they really intend to compete in cloud hosting against Amazon"

I don't think so, not directly anyway. Heroku is platform-as-a-service (applications), Amazon is infrastructure.

Two years is an incredible length of time in this "industry". Look how fast Amazon are rolling out features compared to Rackspace (their current closest rival). Rackspace are losing the arms race. IMV they simply don't have the cloud engineering resources to build (hence the "tom sawyer's fence" which is OpenStack), so they buy. A good strategy if you have the cash.

I can see Rackspace extracting the monitoring features/code from cloudkick and add it to their cloud servers control panel, and leave CK going as it's own entity. That's pretty much what they did with Slicehost iirc.

Agreed, I was interested to see which of Amazon's features were particularly of use to them. As opposed to, say, Rackspace Cloud.

Wait, you're under an NDA from Amazon? :s

Yeah, I updated the title to reflect the update on TC.

updated the title from "State Department Told Us It Was Illegal" to "State Department Said It Was Illegal" following update on TechCrunch post.