I am reminded of those who made money in the gold rush by selling picks and shovels to the miners. Those people are the ones who really made the money.<p>The service looks cool, btw.
This kind of thing is certainly useful, and I like to see another player in the game but I don't detect enough differentiation from Scalr, Ylastic or Amazon's own console, or for that matter the Rightscale console.<p>My 2 cents, I would work on that. The cross-cloudness is quite nice, though.
Seems pretty cool - but I am a little worried about handing over my amazon keys - those things are literally the keys to the kingdom if you are running your apps with Ec2 and storing data with S3, etc.
Congrats! I'm pleasantly surprised to see you've included Slicehost at launch as well. A couple of Qs:<p>1. Why is it free? I'm more than happy to pay for something like this (altho I'm wary of relying on a new startup for such mission-critical stuff, see below).<p>2. How did you manage to convince an impressive 40 YC startups to rely on your service?
Very cool looking service-<p>My nervousness comes from a few points- It looks very new so far..<p>How does this generate it's statistics? Is it running the checks back to a centralized server on their side some place? What's the capacity on that server- If we threw 1200 EC2 nodes to them tomorrow, would it stay up?<p>What sort of service/support plans do they offer? It's free, but It'd be worthwhile to pay to be able to get someone on the phone 24/7. We pay Amazon's gold support, we'd pay yours if it meant you'd take my calls at 3am.<p>We normally use Nagios in-house, which is a great application, but has problems adjusting to dynamic load. This looks very decent, but I worry about the uptime.
How does this compare to Rightscale? Is there an overlap in services?<p>Either way, great idea... We'll consider moving to it for my startup (NewsCred).<p>EDIT: Also, very interesting that you don't provide much information or details about your service on the site. Three logos, and three short sentences at the bottom. I was clicking around trying to find out more, but then realized I would have to sign up (I didn't yet). But I can see a lot of people signing up just to take a look.<p>Was that an intentional strategy? Doesn't it reduce the number of signups or does it increase? Did you A/B test it?
We're beta users of Cloudkick too and these guys are great. The most impressive thing is that they constantly ask feedback and act on it too--the hallmark of a company that's going to succeed.
This is _great_ took 5 minutes to setup and configure. I am very happy with this. Honestly, I'm not positive that I'd pay for this, with other freely available tools around, but it is very good. Great work.
For the devs: When adding a new provider, you should trim the secret key field because I kept copy-pasting from Amazon/AWS and it kept putting in a space character in the beginning of the field.
I think the YC Motto is changing to "Make something others need, and will likely pay for". I have noticed a real nice improvement in the kind of companies being funded. In other words from Good to Great concepts.