wise_young_man

This is a great project Matt. We're working on similar things at UserDeck [1] and I think mobile support is going to be huge. I think you're getting a lot of feedback that may be a demotivating as HN has a lot of developers, but not many business minded people which is what I've found is who you sell and the developers implement it based on the needs of the business.

For example on the build vs hosted service there are many things a developer would not want to build such as WYSIWYG, analytics (figure out what is working, what isn't), ratings (up/down), easy changes (no app store deployment), translation across devices (iOS/android), ticketing (contact form for help). When I had initially thought of similar ideas, Zendesk hadn't moved an inch, but here lately they started getting into mobile support [2] so if anything I find it validation to the market that will just continue to grow. There simply is no reason every developer should build all of that out reinventing the wheel when there can be a service to provide that functionality and focus development resources in other areas.

If you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.

[1]: http://userdeck.com

[2]: https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables

They do have a free version which is just a bit less accurate than the commercial version.

http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/downloadable/

It's faster to snail mail it to the datacenter since while the data transfer method's latency is higher, the throughput is much larger.

POST is used to create a resource. PUT is used to update an entire resource. PATCH is to partially update a resource.

Security through obscurity doesn't always work. You could do the same by calling a list of numbers and playing the odds by using like AT&T or Verizon randomly and get a lot of people that way too.

In addition, you might want to run a process on a non standard port for security through obscurity such as not running SSH on port 22.

Trademarks is generally how it's handled by most big websites. You can usually find something about it in their terms of service.

This is how I've managed to do it in the past working for some companies that had the rights to trademarks.

I started moving all of my domains back to NameCheap from Badger after they raised their prices to what Hover charges.

The domain renewal with whois privacy/guard at NameCheap ends up being a little more than Google Domains.

I keep hoping NameCheap will overhaul their control panel design like they did with their main site.

I will probably end up moving to AWS Route53 or Google Domains or to use their DNS and a clean/modern interface and simpler pricing (include whois privacy).

For those who prefer AWS blog posts over the product page:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-new-c4-instan...

Wow what a great catch. I just tried it and it still works.

I'm not sure how they will really fix it. They will need every client to update and that could be difficult with mobile clients.

You might want to put contact info someplace, most people put it in their HN profile.

We use Route53. It has Anycast and GeoDNS and isn't as susceptible to DDoS. The free DNS provided by most registrars is great, but if you want reliability and high availability it's worth exploring all of your options.

What if the integer exceeds the maximum allowed on 32 bit machines and you try to decode the JSON?

This is great. I kept telling my developer colleagues that AWS EC2 could get more affordable as we scaled and bought reserved instances.

As a bootstrapped startup paying for a year or three years upfront is quite a bit of a burden, but I think this is great progress and will make that easier on us.

I also like Google Cloud's sustained use discounts because it is automatic. I'm not sure if AWS will ever do that, but since I'm such a huge fan of AWS, I'd love it. [1].

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use

I've always been a big fan of Sequel Pro [1] which offers all of that, but only for MySQL. I read other databases are in the works. It's also open source [2].

[1]: http://sequelpro.com

[2]: https://github.com/sequelpro/sequelpro

Billing is such a complicated beast for most startups. I've been working on one for about a year and we were waiting until we got some traction to finally tackle it. We have multiple products as well as multiple plans per product.

We had a difficult time trying to find a solution and recently just built our own package that would drop right into our startup. Another feature we wanted was portability of our business critical data like invoices and transactions so we went with a multi gateway approach so we can switch if we need to down the road.

For those who use Laravel the package is at http://github.com/mmanos/laravel-billing. We also worked a while back on an open source project for a time called Volcano http://github.com/volcano/volcano.

UserDeck: http://userdeck.com

Embedded customer support software that works with your existing website.

The first product we have is Guides, an knowledge base that you add to any page of your site and inherits the styling and blends right in.

We're looking for more users to provide feedback and pain points they experience in other tools as we build more products like ticketing and live chat in a tightly integrated way.

It can't just be "used". You're under oath during a deposition. Lying under oath is perjury.

Isn't Twitpic a free service? You would pay for a storage locker right? Museums charge money.

This stuff isn't free to maintain.

I think the use case with phones will be a hard sell if just for the fact that they keep getting larger every year.

We offer an knowledge base widget that you can add to any page of your existing website and inherits your design and blends into. You can check it out at http://userdeck.com/guides and if you have any questions or feedback, I'm all ears!

We offer an knowledge base widget that you can add to any page of your existing website and inherits your design and blends into. You can check it out at http://userdeck.com/guides and if you have any questions or feedback, I'm all ears!

That was just a few days ago posted on here. I don't imagine they threw all of this together that fast, probably have been working on it for a long time and knew people might say that the longer they waited to release.

I also wouldn't consider open source projects as competition, there is room for everyone to work together for a common goal and they compliment each other. Some like Bootstrap and some like Foundation. Some like Rails (Ruby) and some like Laravel (PHP). Overall it's better to have more resources than less or even none. Props to all.

For those who don't know, MailChimp also has a set of email templates available. https://github.com/mailchimp/Email-Blueprints

Have you seen AWS? Elastic Beanstalk and RDS are pretty affordable solutions that our startup is using to allow us to scale when we need to.

It's a play on the word Carpool and seems apt to me. The Uber brand name is already synonymous with sharing as you share the car with the driver and whoever is with you and they need to distinguish this separately. I also thought it was something to do with bringing you to a swimming pool like UberCats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpool

Good catch, thanks. I didn't see that when I was reading on my phone.

In that case I'm actually really excited about this then as the pricing seems pretty good with the registry price and ICANN domain fee plus the cost of maintaining a registrar and the WHOIS privacy I think I will be moving my domains.

This is a pretty interesting move. Google has started offering domain names [1] in beta, but with my experience with their support I don't plan on using it.

Pricing is a big part of domains for me and AWS pricing seems a bit high to me. I'm also not sure on if whois privacy is offered or included? If it was then the domain price would be fine. I noticed a Route53 zone is included, but is it included in the price or costs additional? I had a domain with low traffic and it was $6/year just for DNS hosted zone so if it was included in the domain price I would probably move all of my domains, though whois privacy is still a big concern.

For the past few years I've been moving to Hover ($15) and then lately Badger ($10) as it is cheaper, but they both have whois privacy bundled in with the domain price as I think it is an important service. I previously worked on and maintained a domain registrar so these hit pretty close to home, but I'm still not really happy with any solution. It seems Amazon's model of getting pricing lower didn't really come through with this new offering just comparing to the current market.

Could hosted email be the next big thing AWS introduces? With as many people who are frustrated by lack of good options (Google Apps) it could be an interesting next stage for AWS (App Hosting, Domain Registrations, and Email Hosting), then I don't know what will happen to traditional hosting providers, but I think they will be trying to figure out how to stay relevant.

[1]: http://google.com/domains

I'm a fan of Badger [1] now as they have the lowest price I've seen that also includes whois privacy ($10).

If you want to use my referral link [2] you can register or transfer a domain for $5.

I'm also a big fan of Hover [3] and Namecheap [4] too. I generally want a no nonsense, no annoying upsells, simple domain registrar. You also should think about what TLD you want as different registrars will have different TLDs especially now that the new GTLDs have arrived.

[1]: http://badger.com [2]: http://badger.com/derek [3]: http://hover.com [4]: http://namecheap.com

There is no SEO benefit for 10 year domain registrations.

We use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and couldn't be happier. We compared the performance of quite a few clouds and EB has incredible speeds over the competition even for paid plans. They just lowered our prices too from their old t1.micros to t2.micros about 50% and we have 4 EB applications so that really made a difference and we combine the CloudFront CDN to leverage even more caching where we can and have a scalable solution for very little cost. Data reliability is also a very important concern so we use AWS RDS with MySQL for our primary data store and Elasticache with Redis.

If AWS lowers the pricing of the entry level EC2 instances that Elastic Beanstalk uses a bit more, I plan on moving all my side projects as it just doesn't make any sense to manage any servers or pay $20/app when I get more flexibility with AWS (ssh to find logs, tight integration between AWS services, etc). The other thing I wish they had was the ability to use a EC2 instance for more than 1 application as we don't really need 4 separate apps, but it's just mostly for cost reasons as a bootstrapped startup.

One thing we don't use, but want to down the road is using AWS CloudSearch unfortunately and currently just use a file based search, but if they lower the entry level pricing (currently more than our entire AWS spend) or we can afford it we plan on using them to manage search.