GoGrid, doing nothing costs $50 a month.
Update: Just wanted to say that there is nothing wrong with GoGrid or their services. When I evaluated GoGrid and other cloud services I was looking primarily for a service that would offer a “fluid” and frictionless transition from a shared hosting environment to a dedicated environment.
The goal was to develop sites on “shared” hosting like hardware, the bottom of the barrel if you will, and then when I need more power upgrade my virtual instance or spin up more of them. This was all about cost management and not having to spend a lot of time playing “IT Admin”.
The reason for my frustration and anger ( although this has subsided ) was because 1. Yes, I failed to monitor a service I hooked up to my credit card and that was stupid of me. 2. I did not expect a bare bones site to cost $50 of month when it did nothing. and 3. I’m unemployed at the moment so any extra expense’s really hurt.
I’m not going to make any pronouncements regarding cloud services and what they are good for at the moment because maybe I don’t understand something about cloud hosting services. What I have learned from this experience that I’m going to need to actually upload a site to a cloud service and see what real traffic, even a small amount, truly costs. 0.14 per Cpu Hour is deceiving.
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A couple of months ago I spent some time evaluating a lot of the cloud hosting companies on the Internet. I signed up for the GoGrid.com trial which provided me with a $50 credit.
Even thought their control panel at the time was barely functional I managed to create a single web server in their cloud and I just left it be. I had no site ready to upload at the time so I just kind off let it sit. I figured the $50 of free credit would last a a long time considering I was doing nothing with the service.
Boy was I wrong. With zero files uploaded to the web server, zero pageviews hitting a website that didn’t exist, and zero code that could execute and take up memory I manged to rack up about $100 in fees from the GoGrid service.
Let me reiterate, the cost of opening up a web server on their cloud and doing absolutely NOTHING is $50 a month. Sure, I’m pissed at myself for not checking up on an service that that bills me, but I assumed that $50 credit would go a long way for a server that doesn’t serve a single page. How are these cloud services going to compete when the cost of doing nothing is 500% more than what I would pay for a shared webhost?
Even with the immediately available and immediately scalable architecture that this provides is it really worth paying 500% the going rate of shared webhosting? I’m scared to what a site with actual traffic will cost.
I hope this blog post serves as a warning for those that thinking its cheaper to host a small site on a cloud service. Doing nothing costs big bucks.
5. June 2009 um 15:17
John,
I saw your tweet earlier about this but never heard back from you (I’m @hightechdad). First, I’m the Technology Evangelist for GoGrid (to make sure that I’m “transparent” here). I realize that surprise bills are no fun (trust me, I hate them as well). Also, I’m sorry that you misunderstood how our billing works, or perhaps we just weren’t clear. I am actually working on a fairly large blog post that fully explains the different aspects of billing. Look for it in a couple of weeks.
However, in all fairness, I wanted to address your statement “doing nothing costs $50 a month”. You can have a GoGrid account, with zero servers deployed, and that will cost you nothing. You can have a load balancer deployed and that will cost you nothing. You can even have 10 GB of data deployed on the Cloud Storage, and that will cost you nothing. However, as soon as you instantiate a server, which dedicates resources, CPU, RAM, and disk space, the meter starts running and you incur charges. As I mentioned on Twitter, if you were to go a dedicated server route, or even a VPS or shared hosting route, you would be paying for it, even if it was sitting there doing nothing (just at different price points).
That all being said, we do need to make it a bit clearer to our users that yes, if you have a server deployed, you will be charged, even if it is in an off state. It’s still reserving the resources to be instantly available should you need it.
With the introduction of the myGSI feature that is coming soon, you will have the ability to create a server image and save it off to cloud storage for just pennies a month. When you need a new server, you just create a copy or clone of that image.
I hope this makes sense. Again, sorry for the confusion about billing. Shared webhosting is a different beast all together. The key word there is “shared” so if someone is sucking up CPU or RAM, your service suffers as well. With Cloud, Xen, Virtualization and Hypervisors, you get the CPU allocation and RAM reserved and dedicated to you, that’s part of the premium price.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me: michael AT gogrid.com
Thanks,
Michael Sheehan