Hello Hacker News

http://jumpstarter.io/hackernews.html

by zachinglis • 13 years ago

28 41 13 years ago

jumpstarter.io

drdaeman2• 13 years ago

favorite frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal

Cough

instead of spending between 30 minutes to 12 hours on it like you are doing right now

I'd say, half an hour is awfully a lot for even for a manual provisioning with `apt-get install wordpress` or `tar xvzf wordpress*.tar`.

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

Right. But most developers aren't server admins and don't want to be.

I press a few buttons and a server is up and ready! :)

drdaeman2• 13 years ago

Right. And I meant, manual provisioning as the "worst" case, but even that shouldn't take 30 minutes.

I vaguely remember LAMP VPS hostings from years ago, and I believe they mostly had 1-click installs for popular software. Here is a random video I've Googled up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlNBTvFfCA (2009), showing installing Wordpress from Plesk. Installation took 8 minutes even with verbose explanations for every step. How your service is different?

minimaxir• 13 years ago

Relatedly, DigitalOcean has WordPress or a LAMP stack as default imaging options.

blubbi2• 13 years ago

I really like the idea, but please include Node.JS or Ruby.

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

Being actively worked on! :)

shire2• 13 years ago

is 2013, you would think Django and Rails would be part of this. PHP already has a ton of support on the web.

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

It's part of the plan. We're working together with people like Chad Fowler to bring that to life. But this is the initial launch with a smaller offering for now.

shire2• 13 years ago

Awesome! really looking forward to it this is very useful, thanks.

IanCal2• 13 years ago

Looks interesting!

How much is this? What timescales do you charge by?

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

Free for development, fixed fee per project per month for live hosting.

IanCal2• 13 years ago

Sounds good, any decision so far on the pricing per month?

saraid216• 13 years ago

So what is this when it's not being knocked over by the flood of HNers?

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

Try again. CDN should be holding now.

rajivtiru• 13 years ago

I only see a 404 page

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

Should be fixed now :)

danso2• 13 years ago

I'm sorry but if you're a cloud service and you have specifically targeted a static HTML page to Hacker News, even to the point of where the title is "Hello Hacker News", you should do everything in your power, even if it means creating a special S3 bucket, to make sure it does not 404.

The regular homepage still seems to work (with missing assets)...but not to sound too cranky, but it was irritating to see the claim of "10+ FRAMEWORKS" and not see the list anywhere on the site. The closest I saw to a list of these "10+ FRAMEWORKS" is waiting for the banner animation to cycle through all the PHP frameworks it supports ("Jumpstarter is an addictively fast and easy way to work with web frameworks like [wait for framework's name to fade in]")

I even clicked all the links I could find. "About" goes to the staff mugshots, "Help" goes to a support center, and the Blog link goes nowhere.

C'mon...

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

I'm going to stick my hand up and say "My fault." We're updating the website a lot right now and it takes a little for Cloudfare to repropogate everything.

About – The people are the about. We could write a story about who we are and what we do - I agree. But that's not the most important task any of us could have done. Help going to the support center is standard. Blog is being removed.

Appreciate the feedback though :)

danso2• 13 years ago

Sorry, to be clear, I clicked on those links to find the 10 frameworks and any other kind of information about it as a product. Each of those links could conceivably be a place for such information

resu2• 13 years ago

Once my favourite framework is installed, will you abstract out most of the common configuration / maintenance / tuning steps as well? Or will I have to ssh in and do that by hand?

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

We're trying to make it as few clicks as possible. If you have any requests feel free to mention them through http://help.jumpstarter.io/

We're really keen on working with the community.

Splendor• 13 years ago

I'm not able to access that page.

"Oops! Google Chrome could not find help.jumpstarter.io"

resu2• 13 years ago

Same for me, Page not fund.

If it's clicks instead of keystrokes though, that's music to my ears!

yajoe2• 13 years ago

As a dev, completely get the need. Yes, most of my day-to-day job is making a small change or reproducing a bug locally, testing, and then deploying. Setting up that loop has been harder than I want to admit and is the reason I know maven, ant, chef AND puppet, Jenkins, and gradle as well as I do. In many ways I wish I didn't have to!

That said, my friendly advice would be to pick one framework and environment combination and solve this problem end to end. Node would be a perfect start. Show me how to use your project to make node dev shorter and easier. If I believe you I will use you and node for new projects. I'm not going to switch an existing project to jumpstart because I've already set up the flow. Maybe I'm weird, but I demand single-command builds and deploys. All my projects already have it. But I'm willing to learn new techs to avoid the pain.

I see your landing page and take away you have lofty goals and are trying to be all things to all people. Don't. Pick one. Focus. Be the best at it. Make a YouTube video that shows me how you get 1-second whatever. It's especially puzzling when you don't have a demo video but you have a produced ad on "flow." It's hard to believe your product has substance during this launch.

I'm willing to switch to angular and node (or hipster.js and kitkat.io -- whatever, it doesn't really matter) to get what you advertise. For new projects. I won't touch existing stuff. It means I have to test and am likely to break something by moving to your project in prod. Nobody ever changes their build scripts!

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

I totally agree. That's why the team has focused on PHP and PHP frameworks mostly for now. Getting the scripts as right as possible over the months.

And we've been using respected members of the other language communities to build up the stacks.

I know for someone like me I want one hosting account for everything if I can. I hate multiple accounts and it's nice to just see everything in one place.

yajoe2• 13 years ago

Totally get the strategy, though I was writing PHP apps 10 years ago... I would be hard pressed to go back, especially after having touched YII last year. PHP is legacy today, right or wrong.

My point is twofold: First, it's very important to nail a trending language and framework. Right now that is a short list of Go, pure-JavaScript (firebase + angular), node, and maybe django. You are going after mindshare of hackers. You have to pick the trendy environments. The whole reason people left PHP to rails was the YouTube video where the guy typed "rails server" and magically stuff just worked. You need to do the same for the short list above.

Second, you have to show the benefit of your product. Seeing is believing. Nothing else will substitute.

While this is the anonymous Internet and you know nothing about me, at least do some gut checks with the current uni kids. Best of luck!

elmertoft2• 13 years ago

+1 on creating a developer centric intro video. Having tried your product, I know that a video like that would get serious traction on a place like HN.

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

I agree. One of my priorities is to create a developer landing page specifically.

Again, really appreciate the feedback :)

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

The status page link is online and will track any page outages. http://jumpstarter.statuspage.io

tsmith• 13 years ago

I was keen to understand how it works and what this "flow" thing is, as the technical premise is really quite interesting. So I click on the video... and start hearing the xylophone... and say "uh oh".

Folks, I have good feelings about good tools, but I don't get them from watching videos of people talking about how they get good feelings from their tools. The promotional video has obvious high production values but lacks any description of what "flow" is/does. It is the 2010s hipster equivalent of zombo.com.

Tell me what it is, what it compares to, how it's different/new/novel. Putting it politely, I place very low value in how it makes some random people "feel" or what sound effects it causes them to emit, and the fact that that comprises the sole content of the video makes the whole thing suspect.

zachinglis19• 13 years ago

The idea is firstly to take the pain out of hosting, rethink a lot of things (how people collaborate, and use it - think forking and merging like Git.

The idea is to help be people's tech partner as they innovate and create, taking some of the pain away and giving them more time.

I hope I explained it better? :)

elmertoft2• 13 years ago

Jumpstarter is the kind of product that just leaves people in awe. I've shown it both to developer friends and to my girlfriend and the reaction has always been the same: "How can I get an invite?".

It's so nice that you're finally in Beta and that you get to show the world what you've been working on for so long. Congrats guys!

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