[davidw]

I still don't entirely get their model. They have all this rails deployment expertise, but you pay a more less flat fee every month, whether you're drawing on their knowledge a lot or a little.

I think I'd prefer to pay less for hosting, and have some experts on retainer for when they're really needed.

They're cool people in any case, and I wish them good luck.

[mechanical_fish]

A. If you are paying a monthly fee, what difference does it make if that fee is called a hosting cost or a retainer?

B. You will ultimately either pay more, or get less value, if you decouple your expert support from the specific hardware platform that your expert support understands best and lives with every day.

C. If you only pay your experts when there is an emergency, there is no incentive for anyone to help you avoid having emergencies. Nor will there be anyone but you to look out for emergencies before they happen, or prevent emergencies by doing routine work like testing and applying patches. And you will have to get really good at finding freelance experts and convincing them to drop everything, reorient to your system, and fix your problem in a matter of minutes as your server is in flames; you may have to pay premium prices for that. It might be cheaper to just pay the insurance bill.

Disclaimer: I work at Acquia on Acquia Hosting, a product which is like an EngineYard for Drupal.

[davidw]

> A. If you are paying a monthly fee, what difference does it make if that fee is called a hosting cost or a retainer?

I have more latitude when I put the pieces together: hosting here, retainer there.

> C. If you only pay your experts when there is an emergency, there is no incentive for anyone to help you avoid having emergencies

That's a fair point, but on the other hand, it also seems that if you're paying an 'expert surcharge' on your hosting, your incentive is to get as much out of that as possible, whereas the experts, getting a flat fee, can't act as de-facto consultants without eating up all their margins that way. There's something of a conflict there. How do you guys define exactly what your role is?

Also, presumably someone is developing the code to be hosted there. The better they are, the more likely it is that they'll be able to do a good deployment and monitor it on an ongoing basis.