It looks like a great service but at that pricing it almost exactly doubles my hosting cost. I can get "good enough" with cacti, nagios and pingdom. I can see expensive plans for enterprises moving to the cloud, but for small founders and ISV's an extra $100 could buy five more Linode instances.
Back in the day I was very penny-wise and pound-foolish -- it was practically my tagline. In some ways I still am. But I've learned about reimplementing stuff outside my core competencies.
It doesn't matter that $100 or whatever sounds like a lot of money to me, or that $100 can buy a lot of slices or software or pizza for that matter. What does matter is that setting up cacti/nagios/etc takes time. That is time where I could be doing things that actually make money, like fun SEO work or intellectual-stimulating-as-watching-paint-dry-but-sure-as-heck-profitable button A/B testing.
A single A/B test which offered a 3% lift anywhere pays for $100 a month, and for companies or individuals operating above my scale, you have even less of a bar to waltz over. I also typically don't have to maintain those (gif files break remarkably seldom in my experience compared to software), where getting more software running just increases the number of things that can need tweaking or go wrong next month.
Now, you're almost certainly a better sysadmin than I am, so maybe knocking together some cacti/nagios scripts is really, really fast for you. But I'm betting the best use of your time is probably more effective than doing this.
That's at least 1200$ every year. With that money, maybe you could pay a friend to knock together some scripts and not have recurring costs.
Also, do you really spend all day doing A/B tests or do you have 'marginal' time that you could dedicate to other things? I think we (maybe not you; I'm speaking in general) make the mistake of saying that since we bill at X dollars an hour, that our time is worth that. It isn't: you can't fill all your hours with pay work all the time.
I agree with most of what you've said, but I just wanted to offer that there is a middle ground between "making money" and "spending money."
Offtopic, Cloudkick is a very sexy offering, and it's priced for a certain set of customers, which may or may not fit you or I, but ideally, I'd like for them to find a cost structure that scales a little better, perhaps. 10% of the cost of the server might work better for users with less than 10 servers, for example.
to be fair, pingdom isn't going to supply you with details about cpu, bandwidth, disk, memory, etc usage for a multi-node deployment - they'll just tell you when its down.
i do think the prices are high, and you could certainly go it alone w/ nagios et al, but cloudkick offers a capable and detailed monitoring infrastructure that plugs into many outlets out-of-box. thats pretty cool if you ask me.
Yes, I am very excited about the new features, but they've priced themselves well outside what I'm willing to pay. If the host isn't down, I can ask nagios for free. If it is down, Pingdom (even the free version) will send me an SMS. There may be a target market for their price point, but I'm not part of it.
We are moving out of rightscale and are considering http://ylastic.com/ for server management. They seem to be offering the same service for less. Or am I missing something?
(update)
I see that cloudclick spans more cloud offerings. That may justify the increase in price depending on your needs. Since we are only in Ec2 ylastic makes more sense for us.
I wonder if it isn't a waste of energy to integrate with 10 different providers and to keep up with all API changes and being forced to find the best way to abstract all the different features of the providers into one interface...
It is if you're having to do it for your own stuff, but if someone else is making it their job, that's a valuable service so long as it gets you out of being locked into vendors cloud solutions.
If they are charging on an annual basis less than it would cost to switch your codebase between any one set of providers, then you're getting a deal.
It's good business sense to drop providers which don't give them a good return on their time investment. It's probably worth the gamble in the beginning, but it's critical they diversify. We've already seen providers like Amazon come out with their own tools and kill off some startups who based their service solely on AWS.
I tried the free developer version of RightScale a year or so ago. RS offers a slightly different service than CK. With RS, you can create scripts which run at startup and configure the instance. RS does automatic master/slave DB server failover, automatic instance creation and load balancing, etc... I'm not sure how their monitoring tools compare to CK. I wouldn't say they are direct competitors, and if they are, RS can do quite a bit more.
That said, I really like the CK interface and will give them a try for basic monitoring.
Yes, just over 1.5 years at ShareThis. ~150 nodes managed by RightScale for ~$4000/mo (Premium account plus an add-on account for developers). In this case, the "managing" includes rich metadata, server provisioning, configuration management, deployment scripts, monitoring, alerting, etc. You can basically think of it as [Chef/Puppet/CFEngine]+Nagios+Cacti+AWS console+misc other tools, all wrapped up in a pretty (and very functional) GUI.
CloudKick's pricing puts it at about half that of RightScale (at our scale - I'm not sure how RightScale is priced at the bottom end), but it looks like the features are monitoring/alerting focused - the management tools appear to be largely undeveloped.
CloudKick is certainly making good headway feature-wise, and I'm glad to see them spin up their revenue stream. I look forward to seeing what other features they add on in the future.
