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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

Flagged as blatant advertising. 100€ is nothing, and I have to make the investment to work out how to use your cloud infrastructure. That investment (of time) is worth much more than 100€, so once the 100€ run out I will feel that I have invested so much already, it will be cheaper to keep using your service.

I'm sorry, but that is not a give-away, it's just a bait.

Btw. Google App Engine is currently "giving away" 1000$ for startups if you register through some affiliate. Technically of course it's the same but the 1000$ will probably last a lot longer than two months on App Engine (depending on the web site of course).

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Thanks for the comment!

As a small company, we can't give out machines/resources indefinitely so we need to have a cap on this.

However, I do believe 100 euros towards a free server is a significant giveaway on our part and due to the nature of cloud computing, not everyone needs to host their services from here on onwards (think campaigns, etc.).

Sad to have received the flag, but we're just trying to offer a server for developers to test/play with.

I can understand your motivation, maybe I just take issue with the wording. There's nothing wrong with offering a free trial. I just wouldn't call it a give-away.

Edit: unflagged... Your terms sound good anyway :-)

Much appreciated - and if you like to reach me personally, you can e-mail me at antti.vilpponen@upcloud.com. :)

Probably because you need to have an "investment of time" much bigger tryin to adapt your infrastructure/app to Google App Engine compared to using a simple IaaS provider where you just have to spin up a virtual machine and use it like a normal VPS/physical server (if you dont want to integrate their API of course)

> That investment (of time) is worth much more than 100€

For future savings, you might consider this investement: http://deltacloud.apache.org/drivers.html#drivers

Disclosure: I've never used it, just think it's interesting.

I don't see anything in the HN guidelines against advertising. Why flag instead of ignore?

Granted, it's not just the advertising but what I felt was dishonest promises. Anyway, I have unflagged it since.

> Btw. Google App Engine is currently "giving away" 1000$ for startups if you register through some affiliate.

What's this now? I'd like some details, did they start a BizSpark like program?

Here: https://cloud.google.com/resources/startups/

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