[laurasanders]

That has indeed been the way for many years and a valid worry. And yet, we're changing it. A lot of hosting companies are white labelled without any major differences.

Our tech was completely written from the ground up to combat this. As said in the marketing materials; if you have a spike, we handle it fine. We've done intensive testing to make sure that being linked to from Hacker News, or anywhere else that gives you a big influx of traffic, won't make your server go down.

We wrote this because we too were tired of the landscape, and we wanted people like ourselves not to have to suffer with this anymore.

[jsnell]

So your website and this comment seem to be highlighting automatic scaling as the major advantage of the system. But I'm not really getting why you think it is worth highlighting. It almost seems like the opposite, with scalability being the weak point.

As far as I can see, your architecture is explicitly limited to a single instance of each app at a time, so there is almost no scope for scaling at all in the first place. The only reason it would probably not be an issue in practice is that the request limits are absurdly low. The story is further weakened by no mention anywhere of what happens when the paid for quota is exceeded -- this seems like a key detail that's completely glossed over.

I can see the point of selling a system like this to less technical users based on an ease of use or the conceptual simplicity of an application as a filesystem. Even if the suggested advantages, such as no need for deploying code and easy copy-paste for starting new projects, make me shudder a bit. But selling on scalability just makes no sense, it almost comes across as snake oil.

[zachinglis]

We don't do horizontal scaling, correct. We have some great advantages of not doing that. We isolate your project, and give it as many resources as it needs.

The largest instance we can put you on is equivalent to 100 Heroku dynamos for instance. And we plan on growing that farther.

I have a blog on a popular host, and when I got hit by Hacker News my server fell over. Doing so caused me to lose a lot of the reads and garner plenty of complaints from here. It can be a total pain, and every time my posts appear on HN, I get scared inside if the project isn't on HN.

As for simplicity; it's not just the filesystem. The panel itself is easy to use, and we're continually adding more relevant features to help people just focus on staying in flow and working on their code.

If we can save devs any time, we've won. And I think we save them a lot of time.

[frade33]

i am currently using $20/mo dreampress you know whom. how does it compare to it? I had HN spike, and website (wordpress) was pretty much calm. they say it beats $500/mo wordpress.com VIP and they are a reputable webhost. whom i am using since 2007

[spyder]

And what happens when the spike causes the reaching of request limit?

[zachinglis]

We won't hinder your website. We'll email you at 80% and if it's a one off spike, then we'll let you go over fine. If it's a monthly thing, then we'll chat to you and ask you to upgrade :)