You Get What You Pay For November 30th, 2007
Here's two anecdotes over two days where people say "deal" when they mean "cheap."
Cheapskate Anecdote One: Hosting
Someone asked who I use for Rails hosting. I mentioned Joyent, a pretty solid VPS (if there is such a thing). Yeah, Solaris takes some getting used to, and yeah, don't even bother with their web-admin interface. But they seem like cool people, and their wiki is pretty good.
"How much?" guy asks.
"It's $45 a month for their starter box." (A much lower barrier of entry than EngineYard's $350.)
He reels. "That's too much. My client spends $5 a month on hosting."
Hobbyists are always suckered in by ultra cheap shared hosts. "You get two terabytes of transfer a month!" Except, they oversell their hardware, and they'll shut you down for CPU usage long before transfer limits.
I once volunteered to write a CMS for a friend. I should have ran the moment he mentioned Dreamhost. They shut down my app because it was spiking at 80% CPU. I moved it to my first-gen mac-mini running debian in a colo, and it's never spiked above 2%.
I'm sure shared hosting is fine for some people. Some people can live at a YMCA. But for anyone but a hobbyist, shared hosting today is a joke.
Cheapskate Anecdote Two: India
Someone told me about their original-online-video-comedy site.
"We got a great deal! A local company told us it would cost $15k. We hired some people in India to do it for $500. It turned out great!"
Let's put aside the aesthetics, (which could politely be called "dull", honestly called "ugly", and articulately called "lacking talent, skill, or ambition." (Yes, let's forget the very first impression, that split second "blink" where people judge you. (I miss lisp.))) Let's look at the code.
- With all the unquoted attributes, lack of doctype, and unclosed tags, I'm surprised this even parses.
- Tables. Welcome to 1994. Good luck with maintenance.
- Gotta love a look behind the curtain: <!-- ImageReady Slices (independentcomedy.com1.psd) -->
Sorry, an American college kid would gladly half ass this for less.
The Point
Some people can't or won't spend the money to get something done right, and the reason they'll fail at this and the rest of life is their lack of commitment. I have never heard of a dot-com millionaire who cut corners on infrastructure. You aren't saving $40 when you waste hours troubleshooting your host. You aren't saving thousands on your site when it only hurts your image.
If it's too good to be true, it is.
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