Launch HN: BitsyBox now available to the public | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: BitsyBox now available to the public

bitsybox.com

14 pointsroachsocal21 comments

Took me a while to figure out what you were selling. You should make that more clear on the homepage.

I also wondered about this paragraph on your features page:

As an added bonus, when you use BitysBox for static image hosting, you get a built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN). We use Amazon's hugely popular S3 storage engine, which means that images are delivered by servers around the world. This makes your websites render even faster, with no setup required.

1) S3 isn't really a CDN, so this isn't really true

2) Product name is misspelled in the first sentence

That's true, you need CloudFront in order to CDN-enable your S3 buckets. It's not too much more difficult to set up, though, just need to flip a switch on the bucket.

Good point. We are, in fact, using Cloud Front. I've updated the paragraph to be more technically accurate (and fixed the typo). Thanks.

1) I think you'll lose conversions at signup when people are tasked with trying to figure out how many "API hits per hour" they'll need. What qualifies as an "API hit"? What happens if you go over your API hit allotment? Does your site just stop working for the rest of the hour?

2) What qualifies as a "user" on a site? If I am a web developer using the service, do myself and my client both qualify as individual "users"? Can we both use the same account?

To simplify the packages I would probably split them up into three different tiers:

Free - 5 Pages

Basic - $10/mo. - 20 Pages

Advanced - $20/mo. - 100 Pages

I would give all accounts unlimited users and unlimited "API Hits" to reduce confusion. If an individual account is bogging down the system I would deal with that if the time comes rather than try to explain to people what an API hit is.

One thing I find curious is that it appears that the client's server requests the data from BitsyBox via a PHP include in which case I am wondering about the content delivery via CDN claim. Wouldn't Amazon be delivering the data to the client's server, at which point the client's server would push the data out via whatever path it wanted, as opposed to the data being delivered directly to the client from CloudFront/S3?

Thanks for the feedback about the packages. We'll take all that into account for any future changes to the offering.

The CDN claim is for the serving static images, not for data served through the API. We're offering a PHP client to make it easier to work with our API, but you're welcome to use your own code to connect, download, and parse data if you want.

It would really help to provide a little more info about what the product is on the homepage. From the first look I really had no idea what you are selling. (That small paragraph at the bottom is really way to small.)

Maybe move the pricing lower and have some hooks to get people interested at the top?

ah... just noticed the link leads to pricing page. Sorry about my stupid moment.

Can you also offer a plan that just charges for API hits. I don't really understand limiting the number of users and pages unless you are hosting pages yourself too?

Oh and your sliders appear to display incorrect numbers while in the midst of sliding (at least on chrome for linux and mac).

Agree about sliders. The totals don't update until you release the mouse (FF 3.5, Vista).

Seems like a lot of work went into this so props for that.

It is a bit unclear though. I think you need to simplify your message or make it more concrete somehow.

Also, U2's great but it's a little distracting on the video..

That's my 2 cents..

I think your landing page is slightly messed up. The red "sign up now" button overlaps the r of "for" when there is still plenty of space beside it.

Browser: Minefield 20091021 on Win XP.

Thanks for the heads up. We fixed it.

Not for me... (unless you haven't pushed the button yet)

Firefox 3.5.3 on Karmic x86_64

Can you guys try refreshing your cache to grab the CSS changes?

Still happening here: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pt-BR; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3

You might want to integrate some sort of cache busting mechanism to your js/css/image files to prevent this kind of caching problem.

Yeah, it's still not fixed. Appears the same as before.

Looks wrong for me too, Chrome 4 on Win7.

Im not sure I understand what your offering or why I should use it.

What advantages, for example, does it have over using AWS directly? (or have I missed the point - it's really unclear)

Hm, I was sure this was an even smaller version of busybox.

To the extent I understand this, you're selling web hosting. But there's no mention of traffic limits. For my $10/month 20-page single-site:

- Can my 20 pages of 'content' each be 700MB movies?

- Can I serve millions of hits / thousands of GB per month?

I suspect the answer is no, but when you talk about "content storage" and "content delivery" such metrics are the usual ways an offering is defined.

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