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?
[...] CloudComputing SaaS: GoGrid Hits 1000 Customer Mark GoGrid is a cheaper and easier alternative to EC2. 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. (tags: cloudcomputing ec2 gogrif) [...]
[...] seen on Techcrunchit, Cloud Infrastructure provider, GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com) has passed the 1000 paying customers [...]
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!