Dirty Aura

I did a quick research of virtual private server hosts that would suit Huikea’s needs. What we wanted at this point is a VPS slice host, that offers an easy and fast way to get new slices with standard Linux distro. No bells and whistles. Transparent pricing.

We decided that we don’t go for Amazon EC2. As we are focusing on mobile, we will likely not get web-scale load-spikes even in a case of surprising success. Using Amazon S3 – or any other truly scalable data storage – for a data backend sets certain hurdles for programming. It’s good to keep those restrictions in mind, but we decided to go for flexibility at this point.

However, we wanted to something that can be scaled both horizontally and vertically based on our needs. Simple, cheap, programmer-friendly VPS host seems like a perfect fit.

Following three hosts seemed to have a right attitude and pricing.

• slicehost – “Built for Developers.”
  Praised for their support and the community. Excellent articles on set up. Was acquired by Rackspace and servers run in data centers owned by Rackspace.
• Linode – “Develop. Deploy. Scale.”
  Prices are between slicehost and prgrm.com. Seems that they don’t have on-site personel in all of their data centers.
• prgmr.com – “We don’t assume you are stupid.”
  Cheap prices. Targeting a lower end hobby market although apparently they have very skilled personel.

Pricing

Our choice – for now
We ended up choosing Slicehost, because of the positive opinion of their support and great articles. We will evaluate again when pricing starts to matter. If you know about other good VPS hosts in this category, please leave a comment and I’ll extend this article.

P.S. In case you decide to use Slicehost based on this post, here is a referral link that you can use to sign up and give us extra credit.

Business linode, prgmr.com, scalability, slicehost, vps

I gave a presentation at the TechStart event of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society on mobile and startups. Why mobile is now an interesting opportunity for a small early-stage startup?

In short, App Store and it’s rivals are solving a distribution problem so that it’s very cost-efficient for a small startup to test an idea, reach users and try to get traction in mobile. This wasn’t possible just 3 years ago, when we started Jaiku. Only reasonable way to get a mobile application to users was through operator or device manufacture deals.

Another interesting opportunity is that new App Store in iPhone OS 3.0 is providing a small payment solution in a user-friendly way. You can build and test business models that have been very difficult in web services as there hasn’t been widely adopted solution to pay few bucks in user-friendly way.

Now, very interesting future possibility is that Apple and others are not actually building application stores, but more general small payment systems. What if iPhone OS 4.0 would provide JavaScript APIs to App Store in-app payment system?

Business, Mobile AppStore, Helsinki, Mobile, payments, presentation, startups, TechStart

I’ll be giving a talk at TechStart event at Aalto Entrepreneurship Society today. The talk will be from a bit different view point than before. I’ll explore why focusing on mobile is suddenly interesting for small startup companies.  The event is sold-out, but there is an after-event meetup at Ravintola Teatteri around 20:30. If you want to chat, drop by at the meetup!

Business, Mobile AES, Business, event, Helsinki, Mobile, TechStart

This is a must-see. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen talks about services and making business in internet.

Among other juicy bits the interview includes stories about testing ideas and concepts via Google Ads and early days of Twitter investments. Did you know that Twitter founder Evan Williams returned money invested in his company Odeo back to investors and said that it’s not going to work, but that they have another idea?

Business Business, internet, video