More of a scratching my own itch kind of thing. Has over 30k registered users but I don't even get enough to pay for my server! LOL.. So meh.. doesn't matter...
Looks like you have a paid plan now, good for you! But $29.99/yr seems waaay to low. I would suggest making that the "personal use" tier and adding a third more expensive tier for businesses.
Because I launched it as a free app... I didn't have any confidence in it and at that moment, there was no way for me to accept payments internationally.
I recently revamped the app, added features like real-time collaboration, chrome-app integration etc., and put that under a subscription. But have no time to market or spread the word around. Moreover, I'm not sure how to get free users to convert over to paid so, that's why exactly why I think this site is an apt example for this topic.. haha!
Just an idea.. Try the wikipedia model maybe and ask for some donations if you've been using the app. I did this with an old product and it was helpful.
- I use the email to announce my upcoming product to potential users. It's also a free product and also a product for tech founders so it seems fair to me. If I cannot communicate with my users, then it's hard to build something.
- 67 decks = 1210 slides. You are the 3rd person to point this out so maybe my English is wrong. For me, 1 deck is a whole presentation that includes many slides. Please correct me if I am wrong.
First time I'm hearing about soyoustart. I've been under the assumption that Linode's instances are the cheapest ones, but the one you linked is <1/2 the price of Linode's equivalent!
Can you share your experience with using soyoustart?
SYS is basically OVH’s lower-end offering that still provides SLAs and better bandwidth (they have an even cheaper offering called Kimsufi but no SLA on those - though great value for staging/non-critical systems).
The experience is mostly solid, though they don’t provide any kind of console access and I once got locked out after putting a machine to sleep from the command line (and had to open a ticket for someone to reboot it manually).
The "problem" is that this is not a virtual machine and most assumptions or ways of thinking that work for AWS or similar don't work here. For example, you can't just upload an image or move data volumes around between machines. The storage volume is a physical disk attached to the machine, if you need to copy them you need to actually boot the machine, SSH into it and do your thing. Similarly, those disks can break down and you need to plan ahead (they provide 2 disks per machine and expect you to use a software RAID 1 or have a backup/restore strategy that can tolerate those disks failing).
This is where building your own layer on top of it (whether Kubernetes or VMWare or similar) makes sense and will make your life easier and allow you to use most tools we take for granted when it comes to VM providers - you're essentially building your own AWS.
This is a whole other league compared to Linode - the former provides VM instances with varying levels of performance - the one we’re talking about is bare-metal and you are guaranteed to have the performance of whatever hardware specs you chose. Bandwidth is also unmetered so you can saturate the pipe 24/7 if you wanted to. Very cost-effective for serving media, though every machine only comes with 250Mbps, so maybe it's better to have an origin server on SYS, and lots of downstream instances on Kimsufi which serve as a downstream cache for the origin - they are dirt-cheap and come with 100Mbps bandwidth each (unmetered as well).
Not exactly a dev-specific tool, but I created a mind map for storing all the interesting stuff I've read/want to read in different formats than just plain text:
