Cloud computing provider GoGrid has announced that they have reached the 1,000 paying customers milestone. GoGrid launched a public-beta in March 2008, and has been growing rapidly since then with their on-demand solution. GoGrid, a division of Servepath, is attempting to make their mark on the cloud computing world against some major competition, namely Amazon’s EC2, Mosso, Linode, RightScale, and Joyent.
GoGrid claims that it is a cheaper and easier alternative to EC2. While EC2 charges 10 cents per gigabyte-hour, GoGrid is 8 cents per gigabyte-hour. It also has a GUI-based control panel, simplifying the process of setting up your network of machines with load balancers, web servers and database servers in either Linux flavors or Windows. GoGrid claim that they have yet to experience a single minute of system-wide outage, and claim that they are well-prepared to handle accelerating demand (as their parent company is a large-scale managed hosting provider).
We setup a quick network on GoGrid consisting of a load balancer, two web servers running Linux and a larger database server running Linux and MySQL. In all, it took a few minutes and the instances were live within 15-20 minutes. We were then able to login and configure the virtual hosts and have a simple blog running within another 10-15 minutes – so the control panel and feedback interface has a definite advantage.
“GoGrid claims that it is a cheaper and easier alternative to EC2. While EC2 charges 10 cents per gigabyte-hour, GoGrid is 8 cents per gigabyte-hour.”
What’s a gigabyte-hour?
Don,
We charge based on RAM GB hour — you can see our pricing here: http://www.gogrid.com/pricing/index.php
Paul Lancaster, GoGrid
I started doing a pricing comparison table for another post – but some of these services use very unique pricing points like ‘cpu units’ and things like that which makes it hard. I think RAM/hour is better than some arbitary ‘CPU’ unit.
@Nik: I don’t – I could care, within reason, about RAM. I want raw CPU horsepower. That’s why I was so thrilled when EC2 came out with the high-CPU variants. All that RAM is wasted for me – I just want 8 or more physical cores. I think EC2 is heading down the right path – you can choose CPU-heavy or RAM-heavy and various sizes of each of those.
@Paul: I must be missing something. The article says EC2 charges $0.10/GB RAM/hour and you charge $0.08/GB RAM/hour. But your pricing page says you charge $0.19/GB RAM/hour. Which is it? (And I have no idea what EC2 charges, since I’ve never priced anything on RAM/hour before. Dunno if the article is right or wrong on that point).
Also, Paul, your “Learn More” popup has you dividing 263GB by 512KB rather than 512MB. :)
I’d love to recommend GoGrid to some clients, but I think some wouldn’t like the Beta label. It’s not an issue to me. And I realise the reasons, with a new hi-tech system. But hope they feel happy to remove the Beta tag in the coming months.
Don: CPU horsepower increases with RAM and you can choose to launch Linux or WIndows servers with 0.5, 1, or 2 GB of RAM today and we’re adding 4 and 8 GB options this month. More info at:
http://blog.gogrid.com/tag/cpu
I’ve been following this area with great interest and (besides S3) GoGrid is the only cloud play I came back to for a second glance. I’d love to get 100% of our stack out there and their service appears to be simple and compatible with our various technical requirements and operational expectations. I plan to set some time aside to evaluate their service further and see how everything hangs together in a loaded scenario.
Calley – how was the performance of the blog you setup? Obviously there was no traffic going to it but was it responsive?
The article gave a list of competitors, but all have servers physically located in the US. EU customers will want to consider local cloud infrastructure vendors to improve network bandwidth/latency and ensure EU jurisdiction of their data (c.f. US Patriot Act, EU Directive on the Protection of Personal Data). The two UK players are ElasticHosts (ourselves, http://www.elastichosts.com/ ) and FlexiScale.
3Tera’s datacenter operators provide cloud computing services all over the world — US and Europe currently, with Canada, Asia and Australia coming up. Customers can freely migrate any applications they operate between continents and between providers — be it for high availability, local access or better service.
We are launching a new app, and love the idea of scaling our network using the cloud, and still have full root access. Unfortunately, when I try to ask a simple question about SSL support to their sales rep (Marc), they don’t give you direct answer, only shoot you to a wiki site and try to qualify you for sales purposes. My recommendation to gogrid – if your trying to convert new users to your service (moving from physical machines to a virtualized cloud), focus on supporting and answering questions that are relative to prospective customers and their needs. I would hate to see your support!
MyResellerSpace.com GB Plan – $69/year : 2500MB Web Space, 200GB Bandwidth, Unlimited Domains.
Sons great, i really like GoGrid. Thanks for the sharing
1,000 paying customers doesn’t sound like that much, but i guess it’s only 16 months. How big is GoGrid’s operation, and how big are their customers?
Took all of 20 minutes today to realize that GoGrid was not going to be a company/service I wanted to invest much of my time in.
The task was simply to set up a temporary MySQL 5.0 instance to execute some tests related to a project I was working on. I created an account (2 minutes), logged in to the GoGrid interface and created a MySQL server (5 minutes).
I waited for he server indicator in the GoGrid interface to turn green (meaning it is active) – approx 10 minutes.
I then tried to remote into the server as instructed using the provided IP and account info. – Fail. The server did not appear to be at that address provided, or anywhere else for that matter.
No problem, this stuff happens. Lets open a support ticket. – Fail. The GoGrid interface required me to log in first but then told me “This account has been deactivated”. Really? Ok, let’s logout and back in to GoGrid and see… well that worked and I could even update my billing information and create new servers if I wanted to… doesn’t seem deactivated to me. Maybe just my ability to get support has been “deactivated” :)
Finally, I gave up and clicked the link to “Close My Account”. I was presented with a fully populated email that I could edit and send off (no online cancellation?). Funny thing is that the email allowed me to identify from a list the most common reasons for canceling an account. One of the reasons at the top of the list was “Too Many Technical Challenges” and further down the list was “Support Response Times/Availability”. Very telling.
I really love the product idea (ready availability of cloud services and VM’s), I just don’t think GoGrid is anywhere near ready for prime-time in the cloud services industry.