I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month.
Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come up as they wish.
It's like asking why do people use Serviced Offices which are usually 10x the price of a monthly rented office. Answers: because they only need the office / VM for a few hours. Because they can immediately get an office / VM of any size they need. Because they can walk away from the office / VM when they don't need it any longer. It's certainly not for everyone, but Regus seem to be doing ok.
And for those who truly only need it now and again, it's great.
But time and time again I see infrastructure where people pay for these services for large amount of instances that are running continuously, blindly assuming that it's cheap because it's cloud. There's a bizarre level of price-blindness amongst certain subset of customers of Google Cloud and AWS that I've never seen anywhere else.
It's about scaling. Google's offering is a cloud service and Hetzner's is not. You're always paying the same amount per month with Hetzner, whereas you'd only pay that much with Google if you have consistent full utilization (which seems rather unlikely; most workloads do not look like this). Secondly, if you create something that becomes popular, you can scale it up on GCE a lot more easily than you can with a dedicated hosting provider.
If I want to run a processing job that takes a 1000 core-hours and have the results today, I can do that on their VMs for a couple dollars per run. Being able to do that on owned hardware or dedicated hosts would be orders of magnitude more expensive.
Similarly, if you're running hosted app that on most hours doesn't overload a single server, on peak hour fills three hosts, but on a large advertising event or accidental viral link takes fifty hosts for a day, and then goes back to normal - then you don't want to run it on VMs where you have to pay for them by month.
That's true, but those are extreme niche use cases, and in most cases people have a substantial base load that they can run on dedicated servers for anything from 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of AWS/Azure/Google (even with reserved instances and factoring out retainers for someone to handle ops issues).
Nothing stops you from mixing and matching dedicated servers with handling batch jobs and peaks with cloud servers. In fact, most data centre providers can offer the full range from unfurnished colo space to cloud offerings out of the same data centre these days - either directly or via partners hosted in their buildings. At least that's my experience.
Using the cloud as a rented datacenter is never a good idea. It will certainly cost you more.
If you're going to use the cloud you have to do it right, and that means auto-scaling and variable resource usage. Then this option will save you money.
Google's cloud pricing is really terrible. Other competitors are intentionally driving prices down to dominate the market, so Google's prices kind of come across as a joke.
I am really happy to see Telegram growing. I am one of those people who deleted Whatsapp (and lost touch with 30-40 people and several groups) when Facebook bought it.
So far I have been happy with it, even though only like 5 of my friends use it. Yeah, it may (or may not) have security flaws like many on HN complain, but I would take it anyday over FB owned give-us-all-your-data product.
Same here, except the people I wanted to communicate with are either the same or kind enough to install it also. If they don't care about WhatsApp already why should they care about installing Telegram next to it? Doesn't make a difference (to them anyway).
Not the person you're asking, but for me personally I never wanted it. I installed it because a group in school wanted to kick me from the project because I'm "unreachable" (which meant I had no WhatsApp -- email, telegram, IRC, sms, calling, anything would have worked, but no WhatsApp was a reason to make me fail my year). I was sad that I couldn't uninstall it before Facebook bought it.
To further clarify, the service aimed at users who like their privacy but do not have enough time or skill to maintain their own server, neither have IT team at their disposal.
One tweet didn't wipe $8bn off its value, the results did. If the results were released next day, it still would have lost value ffs. I feel angry reading through this and realizing it was a waste of time fluff.
Say what you will, its evident that HN crowd loves sensationalism more than content, as seen again and again.
Your comment is just as sensational as the headline.
I'll ask the same thing I asked someone else: You're saying if Twitter released their earnings as planned after closing that today after opening they would have still lost $8Bn? That is the relevant fact reported by BBC, and I highly doubt Twitter would have dropped by that much if investors slept on the news.
I think the point of the article is that disappointing earnings minus investor relations PR spin cost twitter much more than the normal scenario for bad earnings, which does include IR spin. And that nobody would have known about it, except for this tweet.
I don't know how much truth is in those two points, particularly the latter, but that's what the article is about.
It's definitely sensationalist, but the fact remains, that single tweet represented prior knowledge causing a large, unexpected shift near the end of the trading day. Being unexpected, it seems to have triggered a fear-based selloff that may not have been as bad as if if the stock moved either direction after the earnings report.
No, he's providing an alternative reason for gcc's popularity in response to Rob Landley's email[1] that asserts that it was due to developers determined "to avoid paying Ed Zander extra for Sun's Solaris compiler."
To be honest, I am half-scared of taking equity instead of cash pay. The reason is, I don't understand it as well as I should. It always scares me to think that through some VC-magic, whatever equity I have could end up nearly worthless (possibly an irrational fear since I don't understand the whole mechanism).
This article[1] may help you to understand why you (rightly) have a justified fear of equity dilution as the company grows and (probably) raises additional capital through future funding rounds. The relevant quote: "When you are issued employee equity, be prepared for dilution. It is not a bad thing. It is a normal part of the value creation exercise that a startup is."
The article tries to explain how equity dilution (for both founders and employees) pans out. It is worth a read.
That's a good point -- ensure you get the same class of shares as the founders. Yes, sometimes even founder shares get diluted to worthless, but it only happens when the alternative is the company folding, in which case the shares would be worthless anyways.
Here's the math I do:
share of company * realistic potential valuation * chance of hitting it * expected dilution.
chance of hitting it ~= 3%
expected dilution = 50%
This is definitely a great negotiation advice. I probably could negotiate better terms. But still it'd still start us (employee and employer) on the wrong foot. They'd think I am being greedy and I'd think this is a place where founders would always try to screw me over - breaking mutual trust - effectively ruining the positive spirit of working together.
> But still it'd still start us (employee and employer) on the wrong foot.
Absolutely false. I hear VPs all the time speak about trying to "close a candidate" during negotiations, like a car sale. If you are a tough negotiator you will only earn their respect.
No, you're not being greedy. They are being greedy. Being reasonable in return and walking away when you don't get what you want are the valid responses. Lots of good advise elsewhere in this thread regarding vesting and making sure that you don't end up with 'B' class shares.
This is completely backward. Your perceived worth is tied to your price. You will literally get better treatment and more respect by negotiating a better price.
Not negotiating just makes you look like you don't understand business and shouldn't be trusted with any business decisions.
