It's the picodollars - tarsnap was the second business I fell in love with on HN (the late Kiko was #1) purely because of the awesome vibe I felt emanating from your enterprise (which I'm assuming is a reflection on you as well).
Years later, you've also become a cause celebre for holding true to a clear business and lifestyle vision (again, perceived at distance), in spite of the recommendations and 'support' provided by Patrick and others, including myself. Keep being true, and I suspect the community will keep learning from you Colin.
In all seriousness, the picodollars do an excellent job of attracting exactly the sort of customers I want... and turning away the customers I don't want. They were originally part joke and part a way to avoid arguments with customers who don't understand that 1 GB < 1 GiB, but now it's way more than that.
in spite of the recommendations and 'support' provided by Patrick and others
Don't be too harsh on Patrick. His vision for Tarsnap is not my vision for Tarsnap, but he has helped me to orient myself: The projection of "business" onto the subspace "geek" doesn't look very much like "business", but it's not the same as "kid right out of university who has never had a real job" either, and that's what you would see if I hadn't had advice (from Patrick, Thomas, various YC people, and the rest of HN).
Advice can be very valuable even if you don't follow it to the letter.
Hey man, awesome writeup. I have a suggestion for you: try and architect off those EBS volumes -- as you unfortunately learned the hard way, they just aren't that consistent. DynamoDB is a good option, or adding some redundancy so that you can just use the ephemeral disk would be even better (and probably cost neutral compared to the "consistent" I/O EBS volumes).
Yeah, that has been a work in progress for a long time. FWIW, I started using piops volumes when they were the only SSD option available -- they beat the crap out of spinning ephemeral disks.
Years later, you've also become a cause celebre for holding true to a clear business and lifestyle vision (again, perceived at distance), in spite of the recommendations and 'support' provided by Patrick and others, including myself. Keep being true, and I suspect the community will keep learning from you Colin.