A startup in the clouds

For all startups out there, I think that picking a decent platform that will do the job until money starts raining is a critical decision.

Amazon is where it's at

When I started warpcore.io, I had experience with AWS, they had a free tier, and Startup Weekend gave me another $100 bucks of AWS credit - so there I went.

The AWS platform is quite stable, way overpriced like all clouds (by my calculations it's about 20 times the cost of physical servers), but it's a cloud.

It takes 1 minute to launch a server, 5 seconds to share an AMI with a customer, 1 minute for them to have their own server running your latest deliverable... it works.

Amazon doesn't want my business

About a year later, the free tier was over, the credit didn't last long and I had to register another AWS account with another credit card, migrate, ...

Really easy, but still troublesome.

Another year later, I've got an actual product, website, domain name, some sales and marketing work done, and another year of Free Tier expiring.

I contacted Amazon to ask if they had anything for startups and after insisting quite a bit, we exchanged a few mails and they stuck to their policy of helping accelerator startups only, which brought me two days before the end of the free tier.

No problem though, I had yet another credit card (my girlfriend's this time...) so I migrated in a few minutes and that's that.

A long term solution

A few weeks ago, warpcore.io was accepted into BizSpark, which means I've got about 600 euros worth of Azure Cloud credits to spend each month, for the next three years.

I don't really like Microsoft, despite the fact that they make the best desktop operating system, and I had never considered Azure.

But in this situation, I'll be moving warpcore.io to Azure, because AWS doesn't give a shit and Microsoft does.

Because Microsoft gives me enough free credit to run a redundant dev and prod environment, automated scalability tests, servers for customers, whatever.

Parting words

So there you go, if you're going to do something without an accelerator, I would say pick Azure, at least Microsoft seems to want our business, and on top of that you get five MSDN ultimate subscriptions, i.e. 80 x 5 Windows 8 licenses plus all the Microsoft Software you'll ever want to use (if any).



Never thought I'd say that, but thank you Microsoft for your intensive tech seeding.