GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/10/15/godaddy-mt <comment><USER3> As long as we're sharing hosting anecdotes/recommendations, I'll throw in my two cents: I've dealt with umpty gazillion hosting companies over the last 15+ years, and the _only_ one that has consistently impressed me to the point where I recommend them to clients without any reservations is Rackspace. Both in their dedicated server offerings and the newer Rackspace Cloud stuff. (Rackspace Cloud doesn't have as much bleeding-edge whiz-bang stuff as AWS, but they make up for it IMO with excellent tech support/customer service.)

They're generally more expensive than the competition, but you get what you pay for, you know? I'm sitting here trying to think of a time when Rackspace has ever let me down, and I can't. Being able to have that kind of confidence in your hosting environment is nice.

Marco is correct that shared hosting is a disaster area, so much so that Rackspace doesn't really compete there, so I'm always hesitant when people ask me to recommend a shared host. I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not _great,_ but it's better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else.

<comment><USER4> > I generally end up recommending Dreamhost too; it's not great, but it's > better than what you'd get for the same money anywhere else.

It's notably worse than a number of other commodity experiences I've had.

Dreamhost _aggressively_ oversells. They're hardly unique in this, but they admit and embrace it like nobody else I've seen.

Because of this, DreamHost accounts have two sets of rules: the ones they sell you on, and the other ones they're counting on you adhering to in order for everything to actually work. If you break the unwritten rules (even if you haven't broken the written ones), they will shut you down (sometimes without notice) and accept your cranky departure if you're unhappy about it.

Or maybe before then they'll have a severe service outage that causes you grief, make a funny blog post about it, and despite your amusement, you'll get the sense that something wasn't _really_ addressed and leave.

If I had to recommend any shared hosting I've been on, it'd be Hurricane Electric. Over the decade I kept a small account there, my experience was the opposite of Dreamhost: they may have given less for the price, but they stood totally behind it (and a little further) and were _always_ up.

<comment><USER5> With it's low price point and a very user friendly admin panel, I too would recommend Dreamhost's shared hosting service. I've had a good experience with their customer service and they have some nice bells and whistles such as automated backups, PageSpeed, Railgun (cloudflare), being carbon neutral, etc.

We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical websites. There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to unlimited hosting plans. As you would imagine, the server performance on any shared hosting depends on you and your neighbors adhering to them.

I'll agree with you, shutting down a customer without notice is not acceptable. Maybe if a customer is actively trying to scam the hosting provider by violating the terms... but I think even in that case, customer should be given a 24 hour eviction notice so that they have time to transition elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> > We have to remember that shared hosting is not for heavy or critical > websites.

If you look carefully, you can find providers of shared hosting who will be honest about what they're selling you in terms of capacity and that you can rely on.

DreamHost is not one of those businesses.

> There are always some unwritten, but well-intentioned rules attached to > unlimited hosting plans.

Something something the road to hell something...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "But it's also highly commoditized: hosts can't differentiate their products very much, there's effectively no barrier to entry, switching at any time is fairly cheap and easy, and most customers buy primarily on price."

I don't agree at all that for many website hosting customers the process is "easy".

A typical web hosting customer is not tech saavy they either have it being handled by their "tech guy" or they can't even remember how their files got onto the server in the first place with their static site and sometimes they don't even know who is hosting their site [1].

[1] Source: We're a registrar and we get the calls and emails of confused customers who have no clue where they are hosted. They don't even know enough to look at the whois and see the dns to give them a hint. Actually you'd be suprised how many times someone will access our whois and think we are their registrar.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.

We're working on solving this for static sites with BitBalloon ([https://www.bitballoon.com](https://www.bitballoon.com)).

Both by giving people an instant way to get their site online, but also by making it dead easy to do typical tasks like adding Analytics or getting forms to work.

<comment><USER8> _Couldn 't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies._

I think this is partly because of providers like godaddy who have massive up- sell attempts and navigation misdirection to confuse people into purchasing all their value-add services when all you wanted was to purchase a domain or use their DNS services. It's the rare provider who just wants to do one thing well rather than be horizontally integrated and do a bunch of things half- assed. Unfortunately, people prefer one-stop shopping, but the integration doesn't make it easy to differentiate the offerings as services that don't need to be provided by a single provider. Like you can use godaddy as a registrar, but the ability to _not_ use godaddy as the DNS provider too is buried and hidden. They purposely conflate what can be two separate services.

EDIT: I do remember canceling some godaddy service at one time and the process was super easy. Called and said I want to cancel service, wait time on the phone was low, and there was no questions asked.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if I'd go out of my way to blame their horrible panel on upsell attempts, or confusion. I think they honestly hide most advanced features away because they don't want to invite an extra 50,000 phonecalls a day.

The less trouble a user can cause, the better -- particularly at that scale. For more advanced users it merely invites frustration, however.

<comment><USER8> You may be right... I'm not willing to login to godaddy right now (have to dig up credentials), but their marketing materials on the unloggedin site are _much_ improved over how I remember (six or eight months ago?). The services are differentiated better and the value-adds for each service are actually related to that service (rather than the aggressive cross-pollination of service offerings).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hosting is like commercial airlines. Everyone wants excellent service, but they shop on price, and expect it to be low. Those who can actually spend a lot, do it themselves anyways (private jets). This could be the beginning of a consolidation phase in the hosting industry just like what took place with airlines.

<comment><USER11> The only difference being that once those markets are consolidated to a few key players, they become very different.

You can't just start an airline overnight. It requires massive capital upfront. A hosting company simply requires a server.

<comment><USER6> The biggest deal with doing hosting is not even the server.

It's a) getting customers but actually even more important b) supporting those customers. c) A good online site to take care of the majority of the issues that come up. d) "c" helps keep down the "rtfm" type calls.

The "iron" and everything else is fairly easy.

So a hosting company is really people if you can solve the people problem you can definitely make money in hosting. Despite what Marco says the average retail hosting customer is not looking to switch their hosting if they get "good enough" service. Most don't even know that there site is down. (They do know when their email is not working of course because that they are constantly checking).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Web hosting customers are nomads. If your host hasn't been ruined yet, just wait._

This line right here is absolutely sage wisdom. Here are some of the companies I've bought services from, as well as what I remember happening to them:

        ClubUptime
            Closed in a disastrous closure due to basically being conned.

        DirectSpace
            Still around, haven't changed much

        VolumeDrive
            Very sketchy, I don't really know how they're still in business

        Fazewire
            Local Seattle hosting/colocation company. Originally founded by a guy
            when he was 15, he sold the company when he went to college.

        URPad.net
            Still around, only used them for a short period of time.

        OVH
        Amazon
        Digital Ocean

<comment><USER13> True!

Started with one place I can't remember - started with S. It was cheap and allowed multiple small sites to run off one account. Eventually turned to crap and so we bailed.

WebCentral - gave up on their silly control panel.

Used a place in NSW or Vic that started off OK, then was acquired (BlueCentral, I think?) and turned into a bit of a rude disaster. Abandoned that. Had a site break on Friday of a long weekend, so no support until Tuesday...

Had 60+ clients with CrystalTech who were polite and had great service. They were bought by NewTek and started overloading shared servers and tech support went from efficient and polite to slow and especially dim-witted. Bought again by SBA and things got worse. We've gradually shifted dozens of sites to accounts at Linode and that's been a great move for us.

<comment><USER14> Hosting in Australia seems crazily expensive to me. One of the many reasons we need the NBN.

<comment><USER15> If you happen to be doing Rails development, it may be worth checking out Ninefold: [http://ninefold.com/pricing](http://ninefold.com/pricing) [no affiliation of mine]

<comment><USER16> If you don't mind renting a server in germany, checkout Railscloud ([https://railscloud.de/](https://railscloud.de/))

<comment><USER17> Germany has good value but there are a number of issues with hosting overseas. Latency is one - in Australia one of the cheapest hosting companies is based in Perth but the latency is double that of Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane.

The other consideration is the legals. Moving the server to Germany not only puts your data under EU/German jurisdiction in addition to AU, the new privacy laws to take effect next year will mean disclosing to your clients and they to their clients that personal data is stored outside of Australia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I worked in webhosting for about two years, and can attest to the fact that it's a horrible world. We were pretty good at our jobs, but the company was experiencing some really nasty growing pains, and the product was pretty bad as a result.

One of the big pains in the webhosting world is maintaining legacy systems...we had about 15,000 clients on ancient servers running RHEL4, under a proprietary VPS platform. (And as far as I know, a big chunk of them are still there.) Needless to say, this resulted in a really crappy service for the clients on those servers, and there never seemed to be a big push to get everybody migrated off of them and onto our newer servers running cPanel. We were working towards it, but it was a big endeavor that would leave a lot of clients extremely upset when things invariably went awry. So rather then putting some good development time towards automating the process as much as possible and hiring more support for those accounts that didn't migrate properly, the problem just sat there for years.

<comment><USER19> I feel your pain for legacy systems. Mine is just one shared hosting server for clients I've had for years - clients whose sites still require PHP 5.2 and break if it's upgraded.

Short of ditching them I haven't figured out what to do. I'd hate to be a shared hosting company where thousands of sites break when the server software is upgraded (not to mention Wordpress installs getting hacked every day...)

<comment><USER18> We had a non-neglible number or clients still running on PHP 4. =( It's a dilemma indeed, because upgrading all of the servers and software is bound to break a huge portion of the websites, many of which have been loyal clients for years. (But don't have the dev experience to fix things.) Not upgrading things leads to degrading service, and upgrading things leaves a lot of clients with broken websites.

Also: hacked WordPress sites. The bane of my existence. I must've dealt with several hundred of them in my time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think Marco is overly dismissive of shared hosting; the web should be inclusive and easy to use, and for lots of people with uncomplicated hosting needs shared hosting is a fine choice. See also: Heroku, AWS, any other level of abstraction you care to pick. Many developers outgrow shared hosting, but that doesn't mean the category is intrinsically bad.

(My personal site has been on Site5 for over a decade; they have mostly been pretty good)

<comment><USER21> >I think Marco is overly dismissive of shared hosting

Is he? It sounds like he's deriding the hosting business (the providers, the prices, the way the customer is passed around, etc.), rather than the idea of shared hosting.

>but that doesn't mean the category is intrinsically bad.

Again, the category isn't bad, all the major players in that category are crap.

<comment><USER9> >Again, the category isn't bad, all the major players in >that category are crap.

But, you could state the same thing about bigbox stores, and any large retail experience. You'll never get the boutique experience with an entity doing their best to squish profit out of volume.

All the 'major players' get a bad rap collectively but only because bad news spreads fast, and reputations get destroyed for random instances of bad news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And before it was Ev1Servers, what is now IBM, was RackShack. So, it was RackShack, ev1, ThePlanet, SoftLayer, IBM. We started as a dedicated customer with RackShack, then on to a managed customer on ThePlanet. FWIW, we are on the same dedicated rack as when with ThePlanet, though SoftLayer tried to sell us on their "pod" solution (i.e. VPS).

So, we are overpaying for our current hardware, but haven't had the stomach for another migration. Contrary to what the article states, small companies with already limited resources don't want to spend time moving a moderately complex infrastructure around, on top of the considerable work already on the table.

But, yeah, GoDaddy engages in questionable practices. Automatically adding stuff to your cart (and/or making it confusingly easy for you to do so), bumping renewals to 5 years by default, and otherwise making their UI "consistently inconsistent" in ways that miraculously always seem to benefit them are part of the equation. To be pushy with upsells is one thing, but they take it a step further.

These are kind of ingrained business practices and part of the same ethos that says selling IT services with sex is OK. It is hard to imagine them acquiring a company without that company getting at least a little of that stink on them.

<comment><USER23> GoDaddy is revamping and changing a lot of those billing practices. With new management, there is a push to simplify even at the cost of conversions with the hope that a better reputation will push further customer growth.

<comment><USER22> That's promising. If you are willing to watch out for their gotchas, you can manage. And, they make some things super simple and relatively affordable (e.g. SSL certs). Having accumulated a good number of domains there over the years, I haven't wanted to switch.

So, that shadier/confusing stuff is unnecessary. They have a chance to be a really good company. Glad to hear they are working on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been a Media Temple customer since 2007 and a GoDaddy customer since 2004 [edit: I say 2004 but I don't think that's possible. I must have switched to them sometime after 2006 but I can't recall who my previous registrar was.]. I like both companies just fine though apparently not everyone has been as lucky. I don't know if GD is going to be a good home for mt since GD specializes in cheaper hosting. But...

GoDaddy does a lot to support their customers. Friendly people over the phone. They've walked my dad through some hosting issues he had when he was trying to set a site up. They call me every couple of months to make sure I'm satisfied with everything (and probably try to sell me on that bundled registration). Making them out to be The Devil is too dramatic. And transparent too when he could have linked to the #Philanthropy[1] heading on their Wikipedia page but chose to focus on #Controversies to support a position.

<comment><USER25> The owner, Bob Parsons, pays to go and shoot elephants. - [http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/04/6057...](http://www.brettmorrison.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/04/60573762.jpg) \- look at him with his big happy face, he could choose to spend his time and money in so many ways and he chooses to go and shoot elephants.

Godaddy could shit rainbows all day long and I still wouldn't want to give them any money.

<comment><USER26> That should be called murder and he should be in jail.

Fsck him and his company.

<comment><USER27> Look into it a bit deeper. That was an elephant that terrorized a village in Africa. It was sanctioned to be put down, no different than a rabid dog.

<comment><USER25> He is very very rich, if he had particularly cared about protecting the fields rather than shooting elephants perhaps he would have paid for the installation and upkeep of a fence.

His own comment on the affair was "These people have literally nothing and when an elephant is killed it's a big event for them, they are going to be able to eat some protein." Now personally I supect that there are better ways for Bob to go and increase the protein in these people's diets, other than shooting elephants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This news could not make me happier after moving from Mediatemple completely about 6 months ago. I would say I got out just in time. My experience with Media Temple (I was with them since the beginning and all of the teething problems they had with their hosting in the early days) was fairly good. Support was great, but if you soon find you hit the limit of their hosting pretty quickly. They used to market their Grid Server (gS) plans as being "Digg Proof" and it was once upon a time but then eventually the Grid Server plan lacked behind and getting Slashdotted/Digged meant you had to scale up with burst addons.

I would argue that Mediatemple kind of killed themselves in many ways, I can't see how GoDaddy will do much worse to be honest. People put them up on such a high pedestal as they got bigger, they just couldn't live up to their glowing reputation because of how big they were growing which is a problem not many companies can say they have, Support stayed timely until the end, but Media Temple lost out to Digital Ocean and Linode big time and just couldn't keep up in the end.

I wish GoDaddy all the best, but for the moment I am very happy with my Linode 1024 virtual server plan which never buckles under anything I've thrown at it thus far. Even hitting the front-page of HN once upon a time didn't cause it to break a sweat.

<comment><USER29> Yup, same- we got outta MT just in time about 4 months ago. Switched to DO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the late 90s i was a partner in a hosting company. To this day every time someone asks me to host a small site on my personal server I get flashbacks and the shakes. Never again. Hosting is not a game for people without very strong nerves. I won't even resell hosting.

<comment><USER31> Hosting is a pretty stressful and thankless industry. Your services can run flawless for years and your clients wont think twice about you, but as soon as the mail server crashes you are somehow evil and ruining their business.

You were smart to get out. I haven't yet.

<comment><USER32> I disagree - Bytemark have been in business nearly 12 years, thousands of interesting clients, no difficult ones that I've not turned around to my way of thinking :-)

We've just built our own data centre ([http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data- centre-w...](http://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2013/06/04/bytemark-data-centre-will- you-start-the-fans-please)), have launched our own IaaS product ([http://bigv.io](http://bigv.io)) and we get a lot of recommendations though as we're based in the UK we're not as big on most HN readers' radars. Not _just_ a plug, but as someone who wanted to go into video games and ended up running a hosting company, I've found it more interesting than I expected.

We still pick up business (and staff) from great hosting companies whose founders run out of steam. So seeing that happen over and over, our big challenge is to put a company structure in place where (one way or another) we don't have to make that awful "nothing will change - honest!" contractual obligation blog post. I've seen it happen over and over in the UK too - <USER2> remember DSVR? But also Melbourne last year, RapidSwitch, Redstation ... all beloved names with keen founders that got folded into a bigger company and gradually forgotten.

So I'm 1) trying to put in place products that will last at least another 10 years, and as we develop new ones, also have a transition plan to keep service going without ridiculous legacy maintenance 2) thinking about very long-term private ownership plans, turning it to an employee partnership, or anything else that will give new customers the assurance that we're here to stay even after Pete & me step away from it, as we will do one day. It'll be a few more years before anyone should believes us, but I think 12 years is already above average.

<comment><USER33> As someone who also ran a hosting company (2001-2007, when I sold it--the acquiring company is still in business and doing fine today), there are some people who are building hosting companies for the long term, and many others who will sell given the right $ amount and timing.

Some of the best hosting companies I've been with were run by "lifers" (which is what you sound like to me, too.) You've got a good team, a system, and you're profitable and growing your customer base. You're enjoying yourself, so there's no point in selling.

There are many others for whom the support gets to be too much, or they haven't charged enough to make a profit--in my case, it was both. If you can't make a profit, you can't put the systems in place you need to run a great business, so you kill yourself getting up at 3AM when a customer texts your "emergency support" line. Eventually, you burn out, sell it and move on.

Unfortunately, with hosting being as price-sensitive as it is (I like the comparison to airlines someone else made in this thread), there will always be companies that start up, have an owner that runs him/herself into the ground, and sell.

You "lifers" are in many ways smarter than the rest of us. I applaud you for not giving up and not giving in to the price war. Here's hoping other hosting company owners will read these comments and realize there is an alternative to full burnout mode.

<comment><USER9> Congrats again Erica! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My least horrible experiences have all been with DreamHost as well.

Our company did reseller hosting for about 5 years and went through all of the acquisition stuff Marco mentions. We had to exit SoftLayer because they were horrible, only to be brought right back.

Hosting _is_ a horrible business. To be good at it and have marketplace success you need to deliver over the top support; which is just unsustainable at scale.

<comment><USER35> DH's shared hosting is bad, possibly horrible. Their shared servers go down frequently. Often they didn't even seem to know the server I'm on was down until I sent a support request. I keep my account for testing and sites I don't really care much about.

<comment><USER34> Shared hosting is really bad in general. If you happen to be grouped up with people that are constantly hitting their resource limits and/or the box is oversold it can be even worse.

<comment><USER36> 1996 was my first shared hosting. 96-97 was OK, but I had a project for a client that got shut down after a few days. It was a small ecommerce project, and we got shut down for 'resource abuse' \- CPU was spiking and network was going crazy. Had a week of back and forth emails and I think phone with their 'support.

They were poking through my code, bitching that I was doing "select *" queries ("those are inefficient" they kept arguing). After a week we were reinstated - turns out there was someone else running spambot on another hosting account on the same server. But... we were "ecommerce" so obviously must have been the root cause of a spiked CPU. I vowed at that point to not use shared hosting again, and haven't since 1998.

It's been nicer with cheap VPSs over the last few years - easier to get clients set up with their 'own' servers. I know that VPSs are shared as well, and I've seen issues where one VPS abused resources to the point where it affected mine, but that's been pretty rare (2x in the past 5 years I can think of), and it's always easier for people to track down, isolate and resolve.

Also, it was one anecdote point, and was 15 years ago, and was just 'bad service' but life is too short to try to be putting projects as risk to save a few bucks. Projects/sites generally have enough troubles - dealing with shared hosting is just one more thing that can go wrong, imo.

<comment><USER34> Sounds like you've been using VPSs for a while. Do you have an opinion on the virtualization tech used for various hosts (xen, virtuozzo, etc).

<comment><USER36> Sorry for the late reply. Actually I've been running leased bare metal servers for most of the time. In the last couple years I've had some clients and projects on linode and digital ocean, but still have bare metal servers for most other stuff.

I haven't knowingly used virtuozzo for anything so I can't say. Most VPS I've had have been xen-based, but the hardware behind it seems to make more of a difference. I've got two virtualized xen projects right now, and same code on seemingly same virtualized hardware specs still yield pretty different results on some tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's interesting about standard shared web hosting (mainly used by small PHP-based sites) is how most of them are secretly owned by one company: EIG

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group)

Many people spend time comparing the different services, but in truth they're all the same!

Also, you get much better specs with the free tier of OpenShift, but I guess that will change once enough people switch to it (just like AppFog changed their free tier).

<comment> workhere-io _Many people spend time comparing the different services, but in truth they 're all the same!_

The fact that many of them have the same parent company doesn't mean that their servers, features, support, uptime, etc. are the same. So they're no more the same than Facebook and Instagram are the same social network just because they have the same owner.

<comment><USER38> EIG's business model is to buy up smaller hosting companies pretty much just for the customer base and then migrate them all onto the same shared infrastructure. They keep the front end sites operating the same but it's all the same on the back end. They've done it so many times that they've gotten quite good at the migrations, and then whatever random hardware the original company was using is discarded. Usually noone from the company being taken over ends up working for them, support is sent to their offshore call centres (who actually do a decent job). Most web hosting companies are fairly small operations and usually have a single owner or maybe a few partners who are just bought out and the employees are all let go.

They're able to maintain the appearance of having a bunch of competing companies and you can shop around for the best deal, which they will change around periodically, but it's always the same thing underneath.

Source: Worked for two webhosts acquired by EIG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I remember in 2001 when it was almost a badge of honor to be hosted on (MT), especially if you were one of those website that got the free hosting in exchange of their logo on the page.

<comment><USER40> I was going to write exactly this. It was so absurd... there were people who placed the logo on their footer without actually having any service from MT. This certainly marked my impression about MediaTemple, I've always considered them a snobbish, overpriced company.

Pretty much like Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I really feel the need to plug Nearly Free Speech, my host of choice:

[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

Definitely not aimed at large(r) sites, but for my static sites and a few WP installations it works fantastically. The control panel takes some getting used to, but the "pay for what you use" business model more than makes up for the rough edges. Its all À la carte and I love it, I've been a customer for 5 years with no problems.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think it's interesting how shared hosting has such a terrible reputation.

Really, it's sad, because it's pushing a lot of folks who really shouldn't be running their own servers into the VPS market.

Thats the thing, though; VPSs, generally speaking, have much harder limits. It's harder for that one user to make the server suck for everyone. I mean, it's not as good as a dedicated server, but it's a big step up from the isolation available in shared hosting.

Now that the market price for VPSs has fallen almost to the shared hosting level, I wonder if services that implement a shared-hosting like environment within managed VPSs will take off? Something where the user doesn't have root, where it's managed by the hosting company (presumably automatically) but where there is only one user per virtual.

There are PAAS providers that operate that way, sure, that will let you run languages better than PHP... but there doesn't seem to be an ecosystem of PAAS providers that are all compatible, like there is with php shared hosting.

What interests me about this sort of "PHP as a service" is that unsophisticated users are used to dealing with shared hosting. They understand the limitations. And they want the resource isolation of a VPS solution, even if they are unable or unwilling to put in the sysadmin work required.

</comment><comment><USER43> My experience is the following: not everyone has the same consistent experience with every host, but some are definitely better than others.

That being said, the companies I've had good experiences with, have heard others, and will continue to use/pay are: AWS, Linode, DigitalOcean, and Webfaction (webfaction is amazing for a small cheap shared hosting environment). Other ones that cross my mind are OVH and Hetzner.

</comment><comment><USER44> If I need to host multiple simple sites they go onto one of my linode instances that is set up for multiple sites.

If I need to host a more complex or demanding web application it goes onto a dedicated linode (or may share one).

Dedicated servers that are reliable are very very expensive (Hetzner in my direct experience is nowhere near reliable) where with linode across 3-8 linodes at various times I've had no down time in coming up for 5 years.

Fantastic support, they don't oversell their machines.

Sure if I shop around I can get a similar spec (whether it delivers who knows) for half the price but is it really worth saving 20 bucks if I don't sleep at night worrying about my vps provider going down.

I also like DO, I still won't host anything important with them but for a quick dev/test box they are pretty good.

I've never really gotten why the VPS market is quite so price conscious the difference between 5 a month and 20 a month is so meaningless in the grand scheme of things (I suspect I spend a lot more than 15 a month on coffee on the way to work).

<comment><USER45> I think a lot of VPS hosting is for personal projects or very small business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The most important advise is: Unbundle domain contract and hosting contract. Do not eat the bait of the free domain!

About softlayer: Its possible to bargain with them. We have E-2620 servers there, official starting price at $879, and we pay $299/month including more RAM and a small network. So they had been willing to undercut co-location calculation if you ask them. I dont know if this is still possible after IBM. I guess their sales team now knows better how to barter with big customers.

</comment><comment><USER47> I work next to Media Temple in Culver City, and FWIW, those MT employees in their new GoDaddy hoodies partying with their taco truck seemed pretty happy this afternoon with their new SOPA-backing overlords. I'm not sure if the reaction is supposed to imply something positive that I'm just overlooking.

</comment><comment><USER48> [http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons](http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons) \- this seems somewhat relevant: "Web Hosting - A Market for Lemons".

I'm not sure I got it 100% right, but I think there are some valid points.

</comment><comment><USER49> A nitpick: he's saying "high profits" when I think he means "high gross profits". It's an important distinction. The low cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) is offset first by the competition and later by the cost of hiring people the manage it and deal with customers.

</comment><comment><USER50> I subscribed to a tmdhosting VPS package, and the IO throughput was simply horrible. I collected the IO statistics, and I emailed the support team and asked it to move me to another hardware node which was less overloaded.

The support person refused to do so, but instead, asked me to subscribe to a dedicated server. I explained that I didn't need a dedicated server, as it was clear from my statistic that all faults were on their IO throughput side. He just won't listen and still insisted on up-selling me a dedicated server.

What a horrible experience! Anyone encountered the same thing as I do? Is IO throughput a PITA for your hosting experience?

<comment><USER36> perhaps that was their (poor) way of saying that all the non-dedicated platforms would be just as bad, and dedicated was the only way to get you the IO you wanted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm definitely in the minority here but I just don't see how "GoDaddy is a horrible company run by horrible people selling horrible products." I dealt with GoDaddy in the past and have an active account with them. I think that their prices are reasonable and their customer service is good enough – at least for me. I do find that navigating through their website is a pain and definitely not designed for a non-technical person, but that alone doesn't make it horrible.

</comment><comment><USER6> "there's effectively no barrier to entry"

Made this point in another comment but want to stress the biggest barrier to entry is being able to provide customer support and handling the "rtfm" type calls. So it's a people problem. In the sense that you could start doing hosting as one individual but at a certain point you'd have to hire someone to take care of the support calls that a larger customer base (than one person can handle) would require.

</comment><comment><USER52> For shared hosting I've had a great experience with [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)

</comment><comment><USER53> Is it me or is there a place in the market for higher quality, less commodity type hosting services. Right now things are segmented by type of hosting in very technical ways, but we're now seeing more value added hosting for things like rails (heroku), wordpress (wp engine), etc.

I think people will always pay for service, quality, and experience. Whoever can deliver that consistently will make money in hosting.

<comment><USER54> Video hosting is a good niche too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I work in the web hosting industry and this is a pretty good analysis, and fairly accurate.

I would say that usually the hosts that are trying the hardest are the smaller ones that are not "household names" yet. Once they break out and start growing really fast, that's when the people who made it happen tend to check out and let things fall apart.

</comment><comment><USER56> I would like to know what other people experiences are with regard to Hostgator. Honestly, I chose because I didn't know many other options at the time but I've never had any sort of trouble and their chat assistance is pretty awesome.

I would like to know if I'm actually just lucky or if other people have had this experience too.

<comment><USER57> Will not recommend Hostgator at the moment, even though I used to recommend them for years.

I was using HG for probably 7 years or so. But I believe they recently got acquired by EIG[1]. I'm not saying there's a connection, but I've experienced several incidents that made me change my mind.

At some point I was moved to new servers. The migration process was very sketchy. HG did not send notification emails about the migration on time, which meant once the migration took place, I had to try to figure out which DNS changes to make (were not provided), whilst the service was effectively down.

Afterwards they've had a rather major issue with their email servers, which got blacklisted as a result of a large amount of spam being sent from compromised Joomla apps[2]. This resulted in many forwarded emails to bounce and (my) customers being both aware of the forwarding (which wasn't always desirable for me), and that their emails bounced. The Hostgator response to this incident was painfully slow and they did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the effect on their customers.

I already had shared hosting services running with webfaction, so I moved most of it away to them. For more heavy-weight hosting, where I need more control, I use Linode and AWS.

[1][http://www.shoutmeloud.com/hostgator-sold-endurance- enduranc...](http://www.shoutmeloud.com/hostgator-sold-endurance-endurance- group.html) [2][http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting- res...](http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting-results-in- undeliverable-email/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Hmm, the recommendations at the end of the article still seem pretty pricey to me. I'm personally a fan of LeaseWeb; been renting servers with them for 5 years now and still very happy, at a good price (~€100 for 100MBit unmetered, quadcore xenon x3440, 16GB ram, 2x2TB HDD and ESXi 5.1)

</comment><comment><USER59> its a nice post, and the note that MT was planning for exist since day one is insightful ... i didnt know that

but i cant help but feel, the MT story was forced into this post to make the much general point that most hosting companies are horrible

also, he does seem to miss a smallish fact MT or he doesnt raise it clear enough .. MT was not a great host .. it was an expensive mediocre host ... but i think he probably did downplay this a little to make his louder statement that things will get worst for MT ... mainly because the founders left

i have to disagree, MT wasnt, he sort of admit it, the founder was never a believer he admit it ... MT didnt loose much

plus if hosting is such a comodity and MT wasnt good .. the customers should feel they really lost anything

again i believe marco used MT story as just an excuse to make this post ...

</comment><comment><USER60> Don't pay for hosting. Run your own box on a static IP. I've done it for a decade for the 12+ sites my business operates for its various brands. The traffic is fairly light, sites are mostly static, but the cost savings add up.

<comment><USER61> My geek side really wants to run my own box but as I am currently paying $50 a year to host 4 websites, it's difficult to justify the electricity bill plus the cost of a static IP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I've been happy with server289.com for my personal site for several years now. The one time I had an issue (which turned out to be pilot error on my part) they were quite responsive and very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER63> I've been with Media3 Webhosting since 1999 for all my clients ( mainly for Coldfusion Hosting ) and the great thing about them is I can get a live person within a minute to a few minutes, any time.

</comment><comment><USER64> I always considered MT to be a marketing company so this seems to be a perfect fit. I mean that literally because I always joke that they are the designer jeans of hosting.

</comment><comment><USER65> well, it was a good run, MT.

I wonder how many of their employees will leave MT

<comment><USER9> Apparently, quite a few have already in advance of the announcement -- however that's all hearsay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Oh for the love of god. MT was one decent hosting company, now bought out by the people shits all over themselves and their customers.

</comment><comment><USER67> I had a terrible experience with MT a couple of years ago. GoDaddy won't be ruining them. They wrecked themselves.

</comment><comment><USER68> Media Temple had to know during the talks that any acquisition would cost them dearly.

</comment><comment><USER69> I am a proud user of Uberspace (see [https://uberspace.de](https://uberspace.de)) - unfortunately they are based in Germany and therefore all of their amazing documentation is in german too. They have adopted a Dokuwiki-based documentation and their support on Twitter (@ubernauten) and via mail is kind, fast and amazingly personal. It's a real shame they have no plans to expand to an international market. They claim that the quality of their service and the documentation would suffer if they'd go the dual-language route so they'd rather not do so in order to keep their current quality.

Their datacenters are located in Frankfurt so the roundtrip to the US might come with a latency you'd want to avoid, but you should at least try them anyways. They will gladly offer their support in english, but consider that english isn't their native tongue. You can even send them GPG encrypted mail.

Uberspace is quite young (they started in the beginning of 2011 afaik) but they've only improved during all that time and there was no decline in their service quality after word got around that they are the go-to provider for german customers seeking shared webhosting. They offer anything from ruby/rails to python to nodejs, mongodb, postgresql - and even php in different versions from 5.3 to 5.5 including almost all revelant point releases. They only offer 10GB of storage which is not easily expandable but they place no limit on the amount of Uberspace-accounts you create, so if you are hosting different projects you can simply scale them to different accounts which might end up on different nodes. (which are never too overbooked that it might impact the performance - and if it does, they'll upgrade the hardware to fix that!)

You decide what you want to pay! They want at least 1EUR per month but you can adjust your price to anything you want and you can even change your prices on a monthly basis. They say that they want all people to be able to state their opinion on the internet and that's why they're hoping that people with a bigger budget chose to set their price to their recommendation of 5-10EUR per month. But they will never beg you to pay more if you stay with 1EUR and your service won't suffer either. (I have several accounts and a 2 of them have the default price and I got amazingly fast help via mail despite only paying 1EUR for these accounts)

You don't need to give them any personal data if you simply want to create an account (all you need is <8 letter username and a password or OpenID). They will give you a fully usable Linux-account on one of several dozen CentOS- powered servers in return and you can even run your own services (via djb's daemontools) or ask them to open up a higher (>61000) port for you if you want to host a xmpp-server or something. You can't get unencrypted (as in non-TLS) IMAP/POP3/SMTP and they don't offer FTP because of its bad security. Instead you'll work via a fully capable SSH-connection and have SCP/SFTP-access to transfer files. Their webinterface is simpyl called "dashboard" and offers only the most basic stuff like creating virtual mailaccounts and password and SSH key-management. They're giving you your own IPv6-address and their servers have been dual-stack from the beginning. You can also create your own SSL- certificate for your own domain (which you don't even need to register/transfer at Uberspace, just add the domain to your account and setup your DNS and you're done.

If you're up to the challenge and have lots of experience as a Linux- systemsadministrator, start your own Uberspace-service outside of Germany and you'll get rich within a year if you can offer their commitment and service.

I'll never ever go back to lame hosting providers where I'll have to fiddle with crude and slow webinterfaces. At least for me the roundtrip to Sweden is acceptable and their documentation is understandable when translated to english by Google.

On the topic of Marco's claims regarding hosting providers I can simply state from my experience that Uberspace seems behave diametral to his expectations so far.

(I am not being paid for this and I'm also not affiliated with Uberspace other than being a happy customer.)

</comment><comment><USER70> Am I the only one that never had problems with GoDaddy?

</comment><comment><USER71> I use mt for one of my sites, hope this isn't A turn for the worst.

<comment><USER65> you should probably prepare for the worst.</comment></comment>


Deconstruction with Discrete Embeddings - <AUTHOR> https://r2rt.com/deconstruction-with-discrete-embeddings.html <comment><USER2> Very nice!

I've been having similar thoughts for a while (and also have done some non- public research along similar lines).

For those who are mystified or confused by the OP's title, the idea is to train DNNs to learn to map continuous objects to discrete embeddings, i.e., to map such objects to _a list of learned entities drawn from a learned vocabulary_ , with each entity representing a different "feature" or "category."

Perhaps a better term to describe what the DNN is doing is _unembedding dense /continuous embeddings_. Once the DNN is trained, we feed object embeddings (e.g., objects embedded in a grid of pixels) and the DNN outputs a list of features/categories that describe the object.

Obviously, those discrete DNN-learned features/categories necessarily will have less representational capacity than continuous (floating point) ones, but they enable all sorts of interesting applications that are otherwise impractical or not feasible. The author barely hints at some of these possible uses.

Highly recommended reading if deep representation learning is of interest to you!</comment>


Untangling Jenkins - <AUTHOR> https://www.conjur.org/blog/2017/12/19/untangling-jenkins.html <comment><USER2> I've been a build/release engineer for quite a few years now, most spent using Jenkins.

It can be quite a heavyweight beast, especially since it's written in Java (so heavy in terms of resource usage) and since it's old (so lots of legacy in terms of architecture).

Still, in terms of costs and scalability (up to the level where you have thousands of developers and you probably want to roll your own), I think it is one of the best tools out there for its role as a prettier cron/queuing system.

A few tips:

* if you can afford it, stop ASAP using the UI for configurating jobs; look into Pipelines or the JobDSL, based on your needs

* once you have more than a few jobs, stop running anything on the master node, for increased stability

* use the minimum number of plugins and tie as few things to Jenkins as possible; script as many things and put the scripts into version control

* backup the global configuration; you can try to version control it but it's tricky; at least back it up periodically and most of the time it is enough

That's it for now, for more details, $200/h :p

<comment><USER3> Going off of this I wouldn't even use job dsl or pipelines as they allow you to execute arbitrary groovy. I would consider emulating Travis ci or Amazon pipelines where it is all declarative not imperitive. This way you can re- impliment and consolidate without doing a Turing complete parse of tons of custom groovy scripts

<comment><USER2> There's a Declarative Pipeline these days plus you can turn on the Groovy sandbox. There's also a YAML based thing but I forgot its name.

<comment><USER3> Can you provide links? I'm on a plane so very hard to Google.

Seriously? Downvotes? On a holiday on a plane and I get down votes asking for a little help? I did try and google and didn't find the stuff.

<comment><USER4> We use JJB, which is YAML based.

[https://github.com/hyperledger/ci- management/tree/master/jjb](https://github.com/hyperledger/ci- management/tree/master/jjb)

for instance

<comment><USER5> Just fyi :)

Docs:

[https://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job- builder/](https://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/)

Reviews:

[https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack- infra/jen...](https://review.openstack.org/#/q/project:openstack- infra/jenkins-job-builder)

Code:

[https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/jenkins- job-b...](https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/jenkins-job-builder)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have come up with a slogan for Jenkins: "Jenkins - The butler that does not hesitate to do a disservice".

It is currently the most brittle piece of infrastructure we run, with jobs spiralling out of control and slaves crashing with cryptic exceptions. Add to that a horrible plugin ecosystem (tried to install the Slack plugin, it crashed all builds and our webhook endpoint). Add to that groovy (I don't feel like becoming an archeologist).

Gosh, can't someone just build a lightweight ci/cd system ontop of e.g. k8s jobs?

Or should we just give up and do managed ci/cd?

<comment><USER7> My workplace has primarily switched all net new ci/cd workflow from Jenkins to Drone ([https://github.com/drone/drone](https://github.com/drone/drone) \- Drone is a Continuous Delivery system built on container technology.). Having managed masters with 20,000 + configured jobs I agree that Jenkins is a very sore spot for our entire pipeline. We've had greater success with increasing the number of masters (one per team or application) and using the kubernetes plugin for slaves. However, most of our pipeline complaints have been mitigated by getting teams to migrate from Jenkins to Drone.

While I don't think Drone currently supports k8s job, it is very lightweight in comparison to Jenkins. Most of our developers would agree that it isn't a perfect product, but it has reduced friction points by a large amount.

<comment><USER8> Interesting war story. We have a couple of master instances that go down all the time because of several thousand jobs running. Gonna ask our devops what they are cooking up to resolve and compare to this solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best Jenkins advice I ever received was from here: [https://medium.com/mindera/jenkins-a-la- travis-6c5a8debbb5b](https://medium.com/mindera/jenkins-a-la- travis-6c5a8debbb5b)

On setting up Jenkins Job Builder using a 'seed job'. This setup allows you to add a .jenkins directory to you project, define a yaml based jenkins job inside that directory, push to github, and Jenkins will create the job you defined - NO web UI required.

In other words you make Jenkins behave like Travis.

Set this up with your first job being a job to backup Jenkins to S3 and things aren't as bad to manage.

<comment><USER10> I'm currently looking into how JJB could be used for simple scheduled jobs. But isn't the setup described in the article basically the same what you can do with Jenkinsfile?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I may suggest my own alternative to Jenkins: builds.sr.ht. It runs build manifests submitted through an API and does not support job configuration itself; you must use an external integration to automate your builds. Build manifests look something like this:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wlroots/tree/.build.yml](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wlroots/tree/.build.yml)

More complex example:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/.build.yml](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/.build.yml)

Builds run with full virtualization (KVM) on any number of distributed (optional trust) build runners. The whole thing is open source:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht)

It's also self-hosting, it builds and deploys itself and the rest of the *.sr.ht network:

[https://builds.sr.ht/job/602](https://builds.sr.ht/job/602)

If anyone wants to give it a try, please get in touch (email in my profile) and I'll hook you up with an account on my hosted instance. I could use more people to kick the wheels and help me find the pain points.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am spearheading an effort to release a CloudFormation template that will launch Jenkins clusters into your AWS account. It represents everything learned while working with Jenkins for over 6 years including 2.5 years of Jenkins at Lyft and 1 year at DoorDash. If you would like to collaborate, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com. The project was written with an eye towards making the launching of a Jenkins cluster very very easy. It's designed with Docker workloads in mind. Some of the gems include autoscaling, instrumentation & metrics, automatic Let's Encrypt certificate registration, GitHub webhook integration and retries during pipeline slave disconnects which makes spot instances viable even when they abruptly go away... something that saves you 75%!! on your AWS instance costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have cycles to help, but please post this on HN when you are ready!

<comment><USER12> Here's a preview of what I'm working on that I just published to YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkflqV6KenM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkflqV6KenM)

I'd love to hear more about what problems any of you are facing with Jenkins so I can be sure to address them in the work I'm doing.

Jon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Man, I'm having this problem right now at work and it's been a nightmare. Admittedly the problem is like 90% cultural.

People (on my team) don't understand pipeline and they absolutely don't understand Groovy. Before, they would just write a job with a shell script that e.g. ran valgrind, etc. Lots of small repos with similar steps, so they'd write one job and apply it to 20 different repos. It worked pretty well.

That's still an option with pipelines, but it feels much more discouraged (to e.g. write a shared pipeline job that runs a multi-line shell script).

It's also just a bit of an organizational nightmare to see 200+ jobs on the main screen (as opposed to 20 jobs that did the same thing for 200 repos).

Unfortunately, it also seems like declarative pipeline is limited enough that we end up writing a lot of Groovy. I sorta get why Groovy became the official scripting language, but it's like pulling teeth getting people to learn even basic Groovy.

I realize, again, that a lot of this is a cultural problem. Mostly just trying to give a counterpoint that pipelines don't always look as clean as the article implies, especially for orgs with a lot of repos (where committing the same 'test.sh' file to each repo doesn't make a lot of sense).

<comment><USER14> _"It 's also just a bit of an organizational nightmare to see 200+ jobs on the main screen"_

I never look at the main screen. You can create tabs that segment those 200 jobs. If your job names are consistent (as they should), you can do the segmenting by regular expression (I'm not sure whether creating tabs requires a plug-in)

As to doing (almost) the same thing for different projects: you can POST XML job definitions to the web interface, so if you have the rights to create jobs and to run code on your local system, you can script job creation. In my experience, that's the way to keep job definitions consistent. To figure out what the XML to POST should look like, grab it from your browser by GETting job/ _jobname_ /config.xml ([https://support.cloudbees.com/hc/en- us/articles/218353308-Ho...](https://support.cloudbees.com/hc/en- us/articles/218353308-How-to-update-job-config-files-using-the-REST-API-and- cURL-))

Yes, that duplicates lots of stuff in the Jenkins job definitions, but you shouldn't treat that as source, but as the output of your job creation scripts.

<comment><USER15> If you get to that point, check out the Job DSL plugin.

<comment><USER14> I would have to convince the system administrator to install that plug-in.

I also don't like having to use yet another language (or two, counting Groovy and the Job DSL separately), but that, I could live with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Jenkins and any other CI/CD tool is a prime candidate for immutable infrastructure; it's the one thing that nobody cares about too much until it no longer works, and it is relatively easy to get going with scripts or Docker

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone here used BlueOcean and have anything to say about it good or bad?

[https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/](https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/)

<comment><USER15> Meh. The interface for viewing logs lags my browser.

<comment><USER17> It is beta-ish still, so that may go away. I was more looking for comments about the features, pipeline etc.

Also, regarding logs the site says this:

 _" Diagnose problems instantly and say good-riddance to endlessly scanning through logs."_

Won't believe till I try it but it's a good goal!</comment></comment></comment>


Rejected from YC (Again) - <AUTHOR> https://veed.io/blog/rejected-from-yc#update <comment><USER3> This is a fantastic story! A couple of takeaways here. The team took rejection VERY well. This is not as easy as you may think. This to me shows the founders believe in what they are doing and have a deeper goal than just making money. The ability to take the feedback and double down in just a few days is motivational.

Second, The power of positive response to negative situations. Lord knows how long it would have taken them to work on MRR if not for the rejection and they could easily have wasted time fiddling with copy and graphics, but the pressure for YC to re-evaluate them made them release ASAP and now they are already making revenue. At the end of the day, YC rejection allowed them to start generating proper revenue before they would have initially, to me that's a win, and they still get to keep the shares YC would have taken and now they have a higher valuation for whomever they apply to next for funding.

This is a great framing of a story that could easily be a sob story blog post. Keep it up, guys. You are bound for success.

<comment><USER4> _> The ability to take the feedback and double down in just a few days is motivational._

Maybe. I took it slightly differently. They received negative feedback after a 10 minute pitch, and immediately dropped everything to change their product & strategy to appease a potential investor.

Was monetizing in this manner at this moment the right strategy for them? That's a pivotal decision to make and not one I'd throw together at 2 am to try impress a party with no skin in the game.

<comment><USER5> I think considering they've grown the MRR to $5000 from nothing since then, it looks like it was a pretty good strategy even if you don't like how it was concocted.

<comment><USER6> It is very rare that I upvote two comments that seem to be in opposition to each other. In this case, I think it's warranted because you're both likely correct.

In your favour, the strategy was successful and they grew to $5k MRR in four months with estimates suggesting they'll hit $100k in recurring annual revenue by the end of the year. It worked so it's hard to criticize it.

But, what if it hadn't, or what if the founders were in a different situation where they had a bigger team? Last minute "we have to do this now" decisions are often wrong. When they're not, they often result in some really ugly code that will be tough to maintain. Further, they can be hard on morale.

Chances are that the founders had this type of conversation and talked about the risks while they were brainstorming. It almost sounds like they had debated this in the past. Those kinds of debates are very valuable and I think that founders need to talk about how a new feature can go bad.

<comment><USER7> I think you're generally right, but "we have to make money NOW" is a last- minute decision that's probably right in every scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We got rejected 4 years ago and ended up building the company to about 40M/yr revenue. And we have many VC rejections to add to it. So dont take any rejections too seriously. Focus on the customer need and building a good team.

<comment><USER9> YC isn't a slam sunk. It's funded 1000s of companies and ~100-ish have made it big.

So you can say 9/10 times they get it wrong but 1/10 is worth it for them.

So if YC gets it wrong, that's their loss. There is no rule that says to build a great product and a great company you need YC or insane VC money.

So kudos to you sticking out and building a great product.

<comment><USER10> Also, ~90ish of those 100 successful ones have come from batches pre 2014, so there is that… ;-)

<comment><USER11> If you define "success" as market valuation, assume that market valuation grows with time for successful companies and YC select companies with a bias for companies that are not successful yet... The fact that most successful companies come from older batches is just a description of their business model right?

<comment><USER10> Fair point! I'm sure there will be some run off successes among the current crop as well, but so far, my sensibilities tell me that there has been a drop in quality—and in general the appetite for risk taking within the YC has gone down substantially.

Without the data of course it is hard to tell with 100% confidence.

<comment><USER11> My sensibilities are very different from yours. I see some crazy risk biotech getting selected, not mention some crypto stuff that a lot of people claims to have near zero value. Even the regular software ones seems as risky as always.

My impression is: same quality, same risk level, more companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> YC is looking at this from the VC/startup perspective. "Does this group of people with this company seem like they can make a billion dollar business in the next ~10 years?" They want founders that target a huge (or growing / potentially huge) market with stars in their eyes and some insight as to how to own it.

If you're content with a small business and growing slowly then you are not a good fit.

You might have a great business in the end, but still not be a fit for the model. Like others have said, YC partners miss big hits. They're not perfect. Keep going and if you have a relentless focus on month over month growth and keep your churn down then you have a chance to get VC-style growth capital. But, if you just want to bootstrap a profitable business you'll be better off doing that on your own and getting bank loans or other risk-adverse capital.

<comment><USER13> What you say is _technically_ true, but given how easy it is to pivot nowadays, and the fact that YC prides itself on accepting teams even pre- product, this "billion dollar business" line seems like a great way to reject anyone they want for any reason.

<comment><USER14> Since it's their money, it seems pretty reasonable that the should be able to invest in whoever they want, for whatever reason.

<comment><USER13> I agree, and I have no problem with that. What I _do_ have a problem with is telling applicants how they make decisions in a nice fair way, when in fact they use another, "secret" rubric that's based more on brand and connections. If you're going to evaluate folks, don't lie about how you're doing it.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure how it would benefit them to "lie" about their criteria, unless they were secretly racist or something (clearly not the case). If anything they would want to encourage the kind of founders they actually accept, to make the process more efficient.

I'm sure the process isn't entirely fair, since picking winners at such an early stage is incredibly hard and they have so little time for each candidate, but I'm also sure that they _try_ to be as fair as possible.

And I write this as someone that has been rejected about half a dozen times...

<comment><USER12> Garry just posted a video about the criteria they used in interviews when he was there...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTgzA6iKZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTgzA6iKZc) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288988)

Note: He was one of the partners assigned to us and invested in our company with his VC firm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a bit off topic, but I wonder why everyone is so focussed on MRR (monthly recurring revenue). Why are you focussing only on people who want to pay you every month?

Especially for a tool that targets beginners. I mean, if someone uses your app enough to keep paying 20€ for it every month, I would assume that they'll soon want to upgrade to "real" video editing software. Adobe Premiere isn't that much more expensive.

Of course, the non-power users can just use the free version with watermarks. But who wants a watermark on their videos?

I always wonder why these SaaS companies do not offer something for casual users?

If I want to edit just a single video from a special event, why do I need to get a monthly subscription? Why can't I just pay $5 or whatever to remove a watermark from a single video?

I understand that targeting casual users may seem less profitable than targeting power users. But there's probably also lot less competition in that space, and it may help with word of mouth advertising if you don't focus exclusively on the most frequent users of your software.

<comment><USER16> Subscriptions are cool right now. It's an easy way, especially when you're a new company, to show that people like your product and _need_ your product enough to use it on a recurring basis.

One off purchases are great for consumables. You wouldn't expect a shoe company to have recurring revenue (at least not monthly, should hopefully take a bit longer than that for shoes to wear out). But for software, the current emphasis is on making products people use, and pay for, regularly.

<comment><USER17> > Subscriptions are cool right now > But for software, the current emphasis is > [...]

Yes, SaaS is hot now, but this doesn't explain why.

> an easy way [...] to show that people like your product and need your > product

This attempts to explain an advantage of Saas, but totally neglects the viewpoint of the customer. And that's the problem I have with it: SaaS is an advantage in the relation between the company and their investors (look, recurring revenue!), but for the customer it's often not a good thing.

<comment><USER18> The reason most companies have turned to SAAS is that it provides a more reliable revenue stream at the low end of the spectrum given that individuals are usually bad about paying attention to recurring billing, and much cheaper to support at the enterprise level. You don't have to support 20 versions of the same product, you just roll out one or two and support those.

<comment><USER19> I remember someone mentioning that one of the dark secrets of the SaaS world is reliance on people procrastinating on cancelling the subscription, forgetting to cancel it, etc.

I think if I had a SaaS company, I'd try to avoid doing that, and encourage people who are clearly not using the product to unsubscribe.

<comment><USER20> Most SaaS is enterprise facing, not consumer, so I don't know how much procrastination fits into it as the momentum behind decision making in a business.

<comment><USER21> As long as you've got the cost approved for your cost center it will continue to be paid until someone says otherwise. The end result is the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tech startups and the Angel/VC ecosystem feels like a Ponzi scheme sometimes. The goal doesn't seem to be to create a profitable business, but to make a good exit with the next investor's money (or the public's in the case of an IPO).

Congratulations on your achievement!

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure it is very common that the next round investors buy shares from the first round, seems to defeat the purpose of raising money. IPOs are a different story though, cf We, Uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It sucks to be rejected from anything, especially YC, but as a catalyst to push you forwards and move from 'interesting tech project' to 'actual business making money' it sounds like your interview was _exactly_ what you needed. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree, we now profitable and own 100% of the company. Thanks, YC :)

<comment><USER24> Profitable with $5k in monthly revenue? Profitable needs to cover market salaries and all expenses, IMO. Maybe Ramen profitable.

<comment><USER23> The Veed founders are in London, and while about $2500/month each after tax isn't great money for a London dev it is definitely "low end junior dev" level wages.

<comment><USER25> So the business costs $0 a month to run?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Video editor in browser

But why? YC takes up a lot of risky ventures but I really don't see video editor in browser taking off beyond a fun little toy so I definitely get why they refused. Could you elaborate more who's your clientele? I'm very curious.

Nevertheless it was a fun read!

<comment><USER27> I had a browser based video editor startup (we failed). Video editing on the desktop sucks if you are not a pro. For causal users it's like rocket science. Enabling video editing in the browser is a godsend since it takes out so much from the equation which makes it hard.

There are now successful startups in this space with serious investments.

<comment><USER28> Huh? How does moving from desktop app to browser remove hard elements from the equation?

<comment><USER27> Just to name a few:

\- installing codecs

\- video conversion to the right format the editor can handle

\- video export to the right format, size, frame rate that works on the web

\- navigating a complex UI with usually the most common features hidden in context menus and shortcuts

<comment><USER14> The first three are more or less the same thing, and could easily be handled by a native app if there's internet.

The last one seems completely unrelated to the choice between browser and desktop. If anything it is harder to make nice UI in the browser.

<comment><USER27> Your point is that a native app is better than a browser app or that current solutions are good enough?

By moving rendering server side, a lot of problems are solved.

Casual users shouldn't install complex solutions and watch tutorials to do simple things.

<comment><USER14> I didn't know the rendering was done server-side, but if that saves time then that's a plus of course.

I don't agree about installation at all, with mac app store (and probably on the PC as well) installation is a one-click affair.

As to tutorials, I don't see how the choice of platform would make it any easier to use, how do you mean?

Oh, and my point was that These points don't really seem to be arguments for a browser app.

I would think that this makes most sense for casual video editing. If you can be bothered paying for a subscription you might as well get adobe or some other established, native app. Installation is trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > So even though we have a great growing company, it is possible YC does not > think we will be a billion dollar company.

And that's perfectly fine. Not every company needs to be a billion dollar unicorn. Not every founder needs to strive for that.

Continue to grow the company organically. You have clearly already found a path to success without YC. YC is great, but is not essential to your startup. Not getting in is not the end of the world.

</comment><comment><USER30> I started a company about 10 years ago. We are making money, but not lots. But that was never the point of the enterprise.

Me, and my co-founders, created the company for us to be able to work with great colleagues and to limit the work hours. Our employees, including ourselves, are not allowed to work more than 40h/week. We have parties and trips where we invite all of our friends and family etc. We make sure our employees have 80% of full salary for at least 9 months for parental leave. Work-life balance is core to our values.

Our employee turn-over is basically zero. And if someone leaves we go out to dinner to thank them, keep in touch and they are always welcome back to our events and parties (also to come back to work for us of course).

I understand the idea of going big with a start-up, make tons of money. But there are other goals one can pursue with a start-up that, at least to some, is just as fulfilling.

Great job! You still have control and ownership and might be better off in the long run.

<comment><USER31> These responses are common on here, and in my opinion, unhelpful. A conventional Vc funded businesses is supposed to either get big or fail. That is the model. Everyone working on them and everyone investing in them gets that. Advocating for someone to do something completely different by starting a low-growth business is somewhat irrelevant to the conversation.

<comment><USER32> Don't understand why you got downvoted, because what you're saying is indeed the conventional wisdom : you can't get big without getting big fast , with a lot of VC infused money, and work insane hours.

I think the next (current ?) generation is going to question that : values like "durability" and "long term vision" starts to get fashionable again.

The old industries were based on "family businesses" where you would take extreme care before letting someone new have shares of the company, where growing was measured in terms of generations, based on reputation and quality of work, and sustainability. And that gave giants, which lasted for generations.

I think it's getting clearer and clearer that there are alternatives to "pump and IPO" models, and that they may even be preferable for everybody (founders, employees and customers) except VCs who needs quick cash rotation.

Note: maybe what you meant is just "we're talking about VC funded companies, not other types". Still, i think VC will need to take new aspirations into account when looking for next gen companies to fund.

<comment><USER33> > Still, i think VC will need to take new aspirations into account when > looking for next gen companies to fund.

they don't. it's not their model. get big or fail is inherent to their model and _is what their fund investors want_. for long term steady value or other (valid) models the VC customers (LPs) can just invest in index funds.

The entire point of the VC is risk/reward. remove the reward and why would you take on the risk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think you were rejected this go around for your own good.

You don't necessarily _need_ YC. You're growing at a growing rate. You're not at any kind of impasse, you're not making a transition. You'd be giving up 7% for a lesson you already got for free.

Bootstrap until you can't.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hello there! I was rejected today for 7th time I believe.

We started selling our product in January, We just signed a contract with Accenture, we are on track to have 1 million websites using our technology and we are about $20k MRR (which we know will be a much more thanks to some partnerships we are about to sign.

YC is an amazing opportunity, but it's just one of the many tools we have as entrepreneurs. Keep working, be better and more important than anything, be permissionless.

<comment><USER35> After 5 rejections, what made you keep going back for the 6th and 7th?

Isn't there a limit beyond which it's a bit disrespectful to keep asking?

<comment><USER34> I'm an entrepreneur, I don't care about odds.

How is disrespectful to keep asking?

Just the act of applying is a healthy exercise, and chances are that the people who got accepted are just better than our company. We keep moving, keep making progress and keep applying.

I don't see what is disrespectful about that. I would love to learn more if you care in elaborating.

<comment><USER36> Honestly you might be past the point where you need YC, but I agree that there's no harm in applying -- if your experience is anything like this one, even applying to YC apparently gives some value to the companies doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Over the space of a year, we had a 60% MoM Growth Rate, 35K MAU and a great team!"

60% MoM growth = 281x growth in a year. So you had 35k/281 = 125 users a year ago? This seems like a disingenuous growth rate unless I'm missing something

<comment><USER38> Why is this disingenuous? Just curious :)

<comment><USER37> If I had 1 user on month 1, 1000 users on month 2, 5000 on month 3, 10000 on month 4, I could claim a 1000% (10x) MoM growth rate. But that'd imply you'll have 100K users during month 5 and 1M users on month 6, whereas it'll likely be <40K.

One of the reasons you look at MoM growth rate is to project how fast it'll keep growing over the immediate future. It's unclear to me right now

BTW don't get me wrong, I like the story and the hustle. Just not these numbers :)

<comment><USER39> Something like this? [https://xkcd.com/1102/](https://xkcd.com/1102/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > even though we have a great growing company, it is possible YC does not > think we will be a billion dollar company.

This is a very positive take away: Y combinator is not for the vast majority of startups (and that's ok). They are not destined to become billion dollar companies, yet they will still go on to provide huge value to a large number of people and turn a big profit - they should still exist, and may even be vital for many.

> "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do > it."

</comment><comment><USER41> Let's be honest. Even solely from money and evaluation point, being accepted to YC increases your evaluation for your startup significantly. I'm not advocating that this is why you need to apply, but FOMO on YC companies is real among VC's. On demo day same companies who are pre-seed or just started get new rounds on $15Mil+ evaluation. From what I have heard and seen the biggest value is advice, but getting so much hype to raise big money is not bad for founders.

<comment><USER22> I've heard from a VC recently that YC is usually associated with teams of very young entrepreneurs and some VCs avoid this team profile. Not sure if this is a widespread stereotype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The most important take for me was that YC gave great free advice even in the rejection email.

When I was working at Google I was not allowed to give detailed feedback to the person whom I was interviewing and I hated that, because I think people deserve to know why they weren't hired.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is why I stopped applying to YC. I feel I've learned most of my startup skills through trial and error by now, and don't have the need for them. I'm able to raise funding, build a product, and grow the business. You guys have already proven to be better than most of the applicants in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER36> > We are now at $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue

You're doing it. Very impressive/cool. YC isn't the end-all, nor is HN. It's _objectively_ impressive that you got rejected, saw something you can fix right away, and executed. Not only that, but you continued to execute/grow from there to $5k.

</comment><comment><USER44> Moral of the story is: there's more than one way to found a company and the current startup model ( place hundreds of bets, hope a few win big) doesn't work for all of them.

This story and others ( like the one of Gumroad: [https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to- build-...](https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-a- billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7)) that show that success can be achieved even when others consider you a failure are refreshing and should taken as an inspiration from those who wish to become an enterpreneur (and possibly by everyone to be applied to life in general).

</comment><comment><USER45> How did office hours between the two batches go? That was left out of the blog post.

Similar to when you're in the lunch round during a job interview are told "oh don't worry, lunch is not an interview, just relax", I imagine attending office hours after you got rejected last time is in the same boat - it's another hidden interview. It's possible that there were indicators during that time period that indicated how the next batch might go for you guys :/.

Best of luck regardless

</comment><comment><USER46> I can't understand some of the YC invested companies. They don't seem to be billion dollar companies to me. For example, why is a form builder a billion dollar company?

<comment><USER47> A form builder can evolve into an app builder.

<comment><USER48> Why is an app builder a billion dollar company?

<comment><USER46> ya

and also saying a form builder can become an app builder, is like saying a plain paper can be used to print money ...

we all know that the delta between them is huge. We are not selling fairy tales to VCs, or are we?

<comment><USER49> Of course you are, "and then they all lived happily ever after, and by all I mean 7 billion people, and by happily I mean paying $10/month or clicking ads"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I would not sweat it. I was an early employee in a startup that got rejected twice from YC (because it was from Mexico) and nowadays is one of the fastest growing FinTech companies in LatAm and just raised their series B.

You know, lots of VCs maintain a good list of anti-portfolio, the most famous being the BVP one ([https://www.bvp.com/anti- portfolio/](https://www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio/) ).

</comment><comment><USER51> Maybe for you next YC app, take or leave this idea... Put Wibbitz out of business by developing AI that can create short videos based on text from written content. For instance, the video at the top of this page, which was adapted from its attached article. [https://www.realsimple.com/food- recipes/recipe-collections-f...](https://www.realsimple.com/food- recipes/recipe-collections-favorites/desserts/wine-candy-pairing)

I don't know the first thing about AI or video, but I do know the humans who make those sorts of videos just read the article and search Getty images. You could prolly train the AI to have the right "taste" based on all the content created by Meredith Corp lifestyle brands, like Real Simple, Food and Wine, etc. Meredith now owns Time Inc, and I know that they and every other media company are doing whatever they can to compete in the digital space. One way is by adapting their written content into short, digest-able, social media- consumed videos.

</comment><comment><USER52> > it is possible YC does not think we will be a billion dollar company

Most VCs always emphasize that they invest in the team and not just the idea. Ideas always evolve for startups. You guys not only monetized your MVP very quickly, but also have shown that you are hustlers and work very fast. Even if your idea "in current form" doesn't generate billion dollars, but you have high potential as a team to find a path to success.

I worked in early stage startup few years ago, their original idea didn't show huge success but they kept improving until they eventually found a path to huge success and then acquired by large company. The improvement all revolved around the same concept (which was an audio app)

IMO, the fact that YC didn't even invite you for the second round means that they need to really work on their selection process.

</comment><comment><USER53> This has come up before here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224157)

Posting because I found the analysis of filmgirlcw in that discussion interesting.

<comment><USER19> It was interesting, thank you for mentioning it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Great story and lots of positive messages here so let me take a different view and get downvoted here. Obviously you want to be as big as airbnb and box otherwise you will not be applying to YC year over year. Point here is that don't settle for these small wins of 100k revenue..and no it is not ok to NOT be hugely successful company if you really want that go be that. Now there are many other VC companies out there who have helped many others companies do the same so Yc rejection is a blow but there are other options too. Don't stop until you get into one.

</comment><comment><USER55> I don't understand. If they make money from the app, why not simply just keep working instead of letting go of a portion of the company?

Sure, it is a lot of money they will get but it seems like they don't really need it?

<comment><USER56> Yo its Tim (co-founder @ VEED). It's not really about money for us, but more about the hustle. We think of it more as getting into NBA or Olympic Games or becoming a Navy Seal. It is tough to get in, tough throughout and will only harden you if you don't break along the way. Just my 2c

<comment><USER55> Ok, I get the desire, but personally I believe it's a bit fluffy.

I'd love to be in your guys position and I have a hard time just understanding why you would want to give away control which is basically freedom, be essentially be cool or be part of an "elite" group?

You guys already are cool, you don't need someone else to be it.

<comment><USER57> But are you giving away control by giving YC 7%? YC isn't a traditional investor. You don't need to raise money on demo day and are free to go back to being a small business that puts profit before growth. YC isn't going to send you an angry email or frankly even remember you if you don't stay in touch and continue to do office hours.

<comment><USER55> Perhaps not. Maybe the contacts you will recieve and the amount of money is enough to help you bootstrap stuff faster.

I have never actually started a company myself, so I wouldn't know. I just think I would be extremely satisfied if I could sustain myself without any investor money.

Seems like a better way to grow in my mind, if you're not aiming to be a billion dollar company anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Sounds to me that being reject was super valuable to you guys anyway and instead of being "accelerated" you'll be able to go in your own speed the way you want with your product, not as YC, VC's or anyone else wants, which can easily "accelerate" you into the void and add extra level of stress to the one already, because imo investors are more like all-or-nothing types, when for you building "normal" sustainable business, that can later be sold for some X-XX million amount, is viable option as well.

Good luck and keep building! :)

</comment><comment><USER59> I remember reading the article when it got first published in June 2019, this is the same article but with an update at the end. YC W20 batch just got all their letters.

Good luck, I hope you guys succeed and keep grinding!

<comment><AUTHOR> The update was because we just found our today we did not make the cut for W20

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Oh, wow. Funniest thing. I started reading your blogpost, got to the part where you mention the overpriced Airbnb, looked at the picture with the white truck and then realised MY TEAM AND I HAVE BEEN LIVING IN UNIVERSE Z for the past 4 months. Moved here when we got into YC and I'm currently writing this message from here. Your story is truly fantastic.

<comment><USER56> Haha, good old Universe Z. Didn't know anyone would recognize it. Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> And how did you feel about Kapwing recently getting $11 million funding for the same thing?

This is how I felt:

[http://www.superanimo.com/animos/mfw-competitor- gets-11-mil-...](http://www.superanimo.com/animos/mfw-competitor-gets-11-mil- and-im-stuck-in-my-dayjob)

</comment><comment><USER62> If you can have 100k ARR organically already why do you still need YC?

Nevertheless, great job and execution!

</comment><comment><USER63> If your business is that good, you'll be able to find $150k in seed funding elsewhere.

<comment><USER64> The $150k is the least compelling reason to join YC. Most people apply to YC for the ecosystem, community and access to (relatively) good VCs.

<comment><USER65> Is that what YC tells you because they know $150K won't go far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Wonderful story Thanks for sharing it with details and updates. A little question is funding the current bottleneck for your growth? If you receive $X Million how would you spend it to increase the growth?

<comment><USER56> We are growing fast. But if we take $X Million yeah we will grow SUPER fast. So yeah. But whether you should do it is up to you, there are horror/success stories on either side.

<comment><USER14> To be honest, it's hard to imagine a horror story where the protagonist has a company that is growing fast and decides not to take on investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Forget whatever YC tells you about how they accept and vet startups. YC is highly biased in their process. For an investment company of their size, it strikes me as odd that they seem to mostly "wing it". There's no apparent (or at least nothing they make public) structure and no real or apparent analytical process that goes into their application process. I'm sure they do have a process, but you can glean a lot and read between the lines on those rejection emails that give very little evidence as to their actual decision making process. It's probably opaque for a reason, right?

I've had friends who literally have gone through them multiple times, taken their money, and failed with multiple different business ideas, that, on their face were both poor ideas and poorly executed. Only to see them get accepted again. Your chances of being accepted greatly increase if you know them personally, or went to MIT/Stanford and part of that crowd. The other case is where you are part of their current focus and just happen to get lucky. What they fund and are interested in seems to change based on their moods and personal interests more than any overall strategy that is more complex than a blog post.

You're far better, at this point, to simply take on debt. With that revenue you could qualify for a loan from any number of banks. Most banks have a small business division and would be very eager to start working with you. Just go in with your current Stripe dashboard and a simple plan of what you'd spend the money on (marketing, development, etc). It doesn't need to (and shouldn't) be complicated, a single page is enough. More than likely, you'll be offered many different types of financing and the terms are almost guaranteed to be better than any VC could offer. If they decline you, they'll give you directly actionable requirements, which, once you've full-filled you can re-apply and they will give you the money as long as you have met those requirements. Unlike a VC, who may have been out the night before drinking and simply decline you for no other reason than their own hangover. Banks make their money in interest, they want to lend you money, they stay out of your business. They do not make money by holding a percentage of your company hostage and pumping up the value (real or imaginary) and then selling to the next guy (which is exactly how a VC operates).

Or look for funding and mentorship in the software community in which you are operating -- from Adobe or one of the other video editing software companies. Start attending conferences attended by people in the video production industry. You might be able to find a niche for your product in a large video production company that could optimize their process or save on licensing costs. One or two of those deals is really all you need.

And the value of the YC network is greatly overstated. If you're building anything other than run-of-the-mill SaaS software, it's almost useless. They can give you money, but they can't write code for you or (in my experience working with other VC's) help you with recruiting, beyond having someone send out blind emails on LinkedIn and adding you to their jobs page.

<comment><USER68> > With that revenue you could qualify for a loan from any number of banks.

I'm not reading the rest of this thread but going to say in the hierarchy of raising funds in order best to worst.

       1. Bank Loan.
       2. Angel Investor.
       3. Venture Capital.

Venture Capital should be ones absolute last resort. Almost to the point if you need VC money consider doing something else.

<comment><USER69> 4\. Private Equity 5\. Your parents' retirement account

<comment><USER68> Since we're digging.

6\. Israeli Mafia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Off topic, but I really like their blog site. Seems very similar to Medium. Does anyone know if they used a template or blogging platform with custom domain?

<comment><USER71> It's [https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org) in its default template.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I don't know why you tech/software startups fight so hard to get funding. Just self-fund it and keep your equity for yourself. If your idea has potential, you should be fighting to keep as much equity as possible, not selling it off to the lowest bidder - VC firms. Only go to VC firms as last option as in literally the startup will die if it doesn't get funding.

The bigger value proposition I see from Y Combinator is simply the networking and community. A lot of the advice I see given during startup school is spot on from my experience.

<comment><USER73> Some businesses lend themselves to bootstrapping, others are just straight up capital intensive. Others are somewhere in between, and venture capital just allows you to "skip ahead" and find out how good the idea really is by scaling it and hiring people to polish it and make it run well instead of on a shoestring budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I had to Google MAU, and MRR. Monthly Active Users, Monthly Recurring Revenue. (Couldn't you just say users access revenue on this case?)

</comment><comment><USER75> You posted the same exact article 4 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224157)

I was rejected too, so I feel your pain. But come on... This is such a low- effort post. It seems like all you did was update it with 1 paragraph saying "we got rejected again." What's the point? Why does this belong on HN?

<comment><USER76> It's content marketing and according to the 150+ comments people still find the story worthwhile.

<comment><USER75> How would you like if everyone kept submitting their old blog posts over and over again?

Do you genuinely believe that would lead to a community of great content ?

<comment><USER76> They will fly off the homepage quicker than you can say "repost"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Awesome effort and thanks for sharing the ups and downs. Quick question - <USER2> aren't you guys on mobile yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Canvas touch events, we just got them working, mobile will be live in 2 weeks max.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Meh, YC is so 2010.</comment>