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CloudPilot: new cloud orchestration & monitoring service
I've been working on a cloud orchestration and monitoring service over the past few months. I'm nearly ready to launch a free beta - just a few little bits left to do. Some of the things it can do for you are:
- Find the most suitable plan/provider/location for you from the available cloud providers
- Deploy or migrate you to that plan automatically based on our constant monitoring and your predefined preferences
- Base that decision on specific and general monitoring and performance metrics as well as your own preferences
- Take care of backups for you, and restore from a backup to a new service provider if your current server is down
- Produce really useful graphs for monitoring your service
- Alert you by email or SMS when your service is unreachable or performing badly according to flexible policies you define
- Benchmark your servers based on CPU, memory, disk and concurrency metrics
I'd like to update this post when I've launched but for now, I want some feedback on the website's content. The design won't be changing anytime soon but it's important that it's clear how everything works.
Any feedback about the content, proposed pricing, idea and technology are very welcome, either on here or by PM or email. I can also let you know when I've launched if you want to try it early on.
Comments
Typo in FAQ
Cool Service, but LET is obviously not your target market, and I doubt anyone here would even be interested in the free beta as your pricing is targeting businesses who need fully managed services and are willing to pay a premium for a trustworthy service.
Why cloudpilot over cloudways? This is a legitimate question I would have as a potential client. What's the difference between buying a (much) cheaper cloudways plan that comes included with 24/7 support and basic management + an external monitoring service, and ordering a cloudpilot plan that requires you to run a whole lot more.
As of now, all I can see is:
1) You get root access with cloudpilot
2) cloudpilot lets you do an "all-in-one" kinda thing
I can see #2 being useful, but for what looks to be your target audience (people who want easy deployments and full management), #1 is obviously not really an issue here since they wouldn't know what to do with root access anyways.
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Just some thoughts from a quick glance. Am genuinely interested in what you're doing (my new business/brand is doing something similar, just without autodeployments. mostly managed services/manual management.) and was some initial feedback that I noticed.
Thanks for your comments, @Jonchun.
I'll fix that now.
No, LET isn't the target market, but often users here like to test things out.
Cloudways is quite a bit different. From what I gather, they do a specific deployment once and then take care of updates and basic management thereafter. CloudPilot does a deployment and then aims to save you money over time by migrating you between providers as your application demands change. This is why the monitoring is integral to the service. For CloudPilot, the key selling point is not the monitoring or the deployments, but the fact that you can switch between providers very quickly and automatically.
So regarding 3. How much money can you really save just by migrating providers? Can you provide any example/hypothetical scenarios where using your services (admittedly pretty expensive) would save more money in the long run vs just sticking with CloudWays or something similar, even if they turn a little more expensive later? Surely the pricing on cloud providers nowadays are so similar that it won't make much of a difference unless you're talking huge-scale deployments... in which case your services are most likely not needed as they probably already have dedicated server admins working on it.
Curious as to how you would sell that service to a small business owner. Take me for example: Would you recommend your service for a website that I need to be up 99.9% of the time (business site), and am using a ddos protected gre tunnel + serverpilot to run my stuff? I LOVE the easy backups/migrations you mentioned, but I'm finding it hard to see that as a reason to move to a more expensive service as honestly.. how many times do you actually need to migrate your site..
First things first - the pricing on the site at the moment is very subject to change and may well go down before launch. Equally, it would be very easy given what's there already to include Cloudways-like functionality at no extra cost. Also bear in mind it does monitoring/alerting and backups too so it saves you some money in those areas. If you think it's too high, tell me what feels right to you.
Possible example: you're launching a new project and have no idea how popular it will be. If you decide to go down the IaaS route, you basically have to overprovision or at least pick a provider that scales well. Say one day your overprovisioning isn't enough and you have to move. Here, before the move, it saves you the cost of the larger server (or the more expensive provider) and during the move it saves you having to spend hours moving stuff manually and the downtime involved in that.
You don't HAVE to move your server very often at all, but if it were completely automatic, would you do it more often to save money?
Server migration is usually a complicated task, in most simple cases it might work but there's a lot of things to take into account like config files etc.
Would work for a simple wordpress site with db but what about a wordpress site with external db server over private networking.
I signed up but login is not working.
In this case it would move the server hosting Wordpress only, which would continue to point to the same external DB server. If you also wanted to include the DB server, you could do that too and that would move independently.
The beta hasn't launched yet - the signup form isn't active at the moment.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Beta 1 is now available. It includes server monitoring, backups and benchmarks. Migrations will be available in beta 2, although most of the work is done already. I've also doubled the server limits on each plan since I last posted here, so the monitoring will be really cheap after launch.
Link: https://www.cloudpilot.net/
Why use CloudPilot to monitor your servers?
Why use CloudPilot to backup your servers?
Why use CloudPilot to benchmark your servers?
Thought I'd try it, got this while updating details though; "Record undefined has been saved successfully"
Also making a new server for just monitoring gives; "Record null has been saved successfully"
Thanks, @iKeyZ. Please give it another go now.
@jhadley I'm getting "Unexpected error fetching record" each time I'm redirected to the profile edit page. This has happened before and after verifying my email.
Most of the profile form boxes are mandatory. If you fill them in you should be fine.
I think the issue that the ones that are filled on sign up can't be changed on the profile page when your required to verify your account but for some reason these fields are blank. Hense
"Unexpected error fetching record"
First a signup form than another form with more fields... A lot of trouble for signing up a beta service.
If you can't be bothered filling out a very short form, you're probably not a very useful beta tester.
I think I've fixed the problem. Could you try it again?
It's working fine now, a suggestion though would be to remove the record number from the success message.
Record 27 has been saved successfullyNot very impressed, when I try and login after I created my account I get a redirect loop on viewProfile
When I visit https://www.cloudpilot.net/portal/viewProfile
it shows This webpage has a redirect loop error
Sorry, @Spencer & @adxn. I've fixed this now.
Hi all,
Beta 2 has now been released with many bugs fixed, and automatic deployments and migrations now mostly done.
Sign up and get free monitoring, backups & more: https://www.cloudpilot.net/
Looks good. Ill check into that.
Is the pricing per physical or virtual server and did you build migration options in to it from day 1 or are you only trying to appeal to new hosts with no existing infrastructures?
Hi @AnthonySmith, the pricing is per monitored server for monitoring only or per deployed server (i.e. container) regardless of where it is deployed to.
@jhadley so per VPS or physical then what ever is greater, I think I will give this one a miss then, cheaper enterprise products out there.
Why would we pay for this when software like
nixstats is FREE
Observium is FREE
and so many more that completely monitor your servers and network and send alerts email and sms?
I already asked that above. Apparently the biggest selling point of the service is automatic migrations... which I still don't understand... They claim it will save money because you can migrate instantly the cheaper services, but you're paying such a huge premium for the service itself, any server costs you save will be spent on cloudpilot anyways...
"Huge premium" = $3/month (inc backups and sms)?
I'm open to having a discussion about pricing but the aim isn't to be the cheapest monitoring (which by the way is just one element of CP) product on the market because that doesn't make money.
NixStats is NOT going to be free. Maybe you have 2 servers, so then it is - but for professionals it won't be.
makes a ton of sense - good luck with the project!
Thanks, Ditlev. I'll drop you or one of your team an email at some point about doing a cloud.net integration.