Having run Cloud66 for the past year, I can say that actually managing infrastructure and dealing with security management such things would have been prohibitively expensive. Cloud66 has taken care of things like heartbleed and package updates (and alerts for rails updates). It's been a good experience in that I learned that I really do want a managed hosting environment - since I can see what they've done, but don't actually have to do it myself.
I would also love to hear a cost benefit analysis a year into managing your own servers.
I'd like to chime in here in support of Cloud66. I've been running normal (non-dockerized) Cloud66 for about a year on a wide variety of projects, including the main Bike Index site (https://bikeindex.org), and it's fantastic.
It's all the ease of Heroku and all the flexibility of actual servers, and way cheaper than Heroku. The only reason I've touched Docker on Cloud66 is JRuby - since this article is about a python app, it would be also require Docker. But for Ruby MRI applications, the logical first step as soon as Heroku stops being cost effective is immediate (and painless) migration to Cloud66.
We've been working on updating our API to V2[1], and decided to go with grape because it automatically generates documentation via grape-swagger[2].
Initially we considered Apiary, but we wanted more flexibility and preferred to host things ourselves. And the fact that our documentation is generated automatically from the code via grape-swagger is a game changer.
As someone who doesn't have a car and is broke, investing in my bike makes a lot of sense - public transit costs 100/month[1], my transportation bike cost 800$ and my yearly cost to maintain it is 100$ (tires, tube, chain). Therefore, in the first year, I save money.
My bike is fast and convenient for getting around, which makes it a reasonable alternative to other transportation methods (it's faster than traveling by car within the city limits of Chicago).
In contrast, a ~100$ bike is much slower and more expensive to maintain. Suggesting only fools ride nice bikes is short sighted.
We need to make bike theft less profitable instead of telling everyone to ride shitty, impractical bikes.
The difference between an $800 bike and a $100 second hand one isn't really that big. You certainly can't call the other one a shitty, impractical bike, as I see hundreds of thousands of people around me ride on them just fine. From menial workers to bank managers, no joke, hell the bank manager in a suit riding a shitty rattling $50 is a common sight, as anyone here in Amsterdam! It's only shitty because it looks shitty and rattles, but it works fine, and for a little bit more money you get a quiet, nice functional bike. The whole 'slower' part is nonsense (to me) unless you're doing this for sport on some kind of a (semi) track. Amsterdam is great for cycling, but you have a stoplight every 200m and cars, people and bikes everywhere. It's not like you can really take advantage of speed, and within the speed limits I tend to zip past 95/100 people on my $100 bike. It's like saying one car goes 200 MpH and the other goes only 100 and saying the latter is much slower. It is, but who cares if you're driving in the city?
I'm just saying this as at times people seem to compare a $200 bike to $1500 bikes as if they're comparing a crappy $250 7 inch netbook to a Macbook Pro Retina. While in reality, it's more like comparing a $15k watch to a $50 watch, they function exactly the same, tell you the time extremely accurately, easily last years, but one is cool, scarce, luxurious, and the other functional.
I appreciate there's gonna be some difference between a $100 and a $800 bike, not saying there's none, just saying there's not that much.
In any case, I concur with the guy from Rotterdam. Bike theft is intense (for me with a decent lock it's about once a year). But my replacement cost is low. I usually spend about $100 on a bike yearly which includes all costs.
Beyond that though, we simply have a huge bike market with lots of competition here. And because everyone rides bikes, you don't have to culturally differentiate yourself with a special bike like in some places where you look like an idiot if you have a cheap bike. Here that's normal and fully accepted, like having $50 sneakers. And the great thing about a deep bike economy with relatively low-prices is cheapish insurance. It's only a few dollars per month to insure a bike worth hundreds of dollars. Percentage based it's actually not great, but you can get a really nice theft-risk-free bike including maintenance for about $15 a month in total. That's hard to beat with public transportation or a car. I wish more cities invested in their bike lanes, a bike economy is awesome. You know all those health studies about 30-60 minutes of activity per day? So many people get that on their daily routine to work, while saving a ton of cash and being environmentally conscious, while at the same time turning transportation into some kind of egalitarian phenomenon with everyone riding bikes on the same lanes, as opposed to everyone knowing poor people often take the bus, and everyone seeing the difference between who has a $1k shitty 2nd hand car and who has the $100k Tesla. I love the bike economy in this city.
Anyway, this post was written regarding the utility of a bike in a Dutch city that I'm familiar with, please let me know your side of the story in Chigago (what's the insurance costs like for your bike and what's the rate of theft, I'm most curious about)! It'll be completely different for people who race, people who buy a bike with a cultural statement about authentic craftsman bike history & culture or whatever, or people who live in cities where you can cycle straight for half a mile without making a turn or running in to a stoplight. In any of those cases an expensive bike makes a lot of sense.
or people who live in cities where you can cycle straight for half a mile without making a turn or running in to a stoplight
I think Amsterdam here is the exception rather than the rule - most other places I've cycled have bikes on the road with cars rather than segregated tracks. Then, a faster bike makes a lot of sense, both from a safety standpoint (being able to accelerate quickly can get you out of trouble sometimes) and because you can actually hit your higher top speed, to shorten your commute.
Obviously there are diminishing returns - going from a $150 bike to a $300 bike is a big upgrade, and going from a $300 bike to say a $1000 bike probably makes less of a difference. But certainly in London (and Seattle from my experience, and probably many places in the US) I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that a nice road bike can make a bigger difference.
For context, here are some of the roads I cycle down when I cycle to work:
We've successfully recovered thousands of bikes (three in the past two days!). We've made it easy to id stolen bikes, and more difficult to sell stolen bikes - which makes ultimately bike theft less appealing.
GPS trackers are great - but unfortunately, they have yet to meet these vital requirements: easy to charge, difficult to remove, waterproof, cheap enough to put on everyone's bikes.
User privacy, giving out all of our user's emails for instance would be dishonest since it would completely violate all of our promises to them. And why would us seeking investment lead to someone wanting to fork the Index?
Because maybe they're not interested in your monetization strategy. It seems disingenuous to pretend to be about honesty and openness when the only value to any investor down the road would be the size and targeted nature of your user database.
I'm feeling the same way. Had an interesting conversation last night where someone said they would totally give us a bit of money after telling him what we're spending per month and how. I'll think about where and how to talk about it.
