Note: this is a post from a blog post series about starting up 10 businesses in a year.

 

Introduction

I love appharbour, in fact, I have 8 apps running over there at this moment. A little while ago, appharbour announced that they now have to start making some money, so that they were going to charge for custom hostnames...
I got a little dissapointed, since custom hostnames are an artificial limit, they do not add a lot of overhead to the system AFAIK, so why the hell would they charge for something like that??? I even was thinking about migrating my app to NodeJS, CoffeeScript and Zappa and switching to Heroku so I could have a free hostname, I even set up a poc to check the feasibility....

 

So I would have to pay 10€/month/site , and I do not have any profit yet...

And I want to build 10 different sites this year, so I would have to pay 100€/month just for custom hostnames, that is 1.2K€/year; for that price I can get a lot of hosting... So I posted them this message, and they replied that I could find other hosting for this price, but the service would be different...

I could use options like web forwarding or cloaking, but this looks highly unprofessional... Maybe there are other alternatives ???

I decided to let this issue rest for a few weeks and progressed with my first two startups (blommekes.be and dampen.be), updating them about umphteen times/day using a simple "git push apphb"... I could push fearlessly as I could just as easily revert to the previous version by the click of a mouse button... That is exactly one of the reasons I love it; they offer such a fine infrastructure... I even setup a simple staging environment by adding another apphb instance and a git remote...

 

Then I started thinking even more...

After messing up 35€ and a lot of hours for MF*** Alertpay (which I'll never ever use again for sure), I paid 300€ to activate an Ogone account. I now also pay a monthly fee of 65€ for their service... Next to this I pay 4% for all transactions over mastercard/amex/maestro credit cards... I ordered 100 cardboard boxes for blommekes.be at 2.36€ a piece... Why the hell was I making a fuss about 10€/Month for a custom hostname....

 

Here's the thing....

With my startups I would like to make money; the more the merrier... I assume the folks over at appharbour have the same goal. What was I making all this fuss about ? I presume I was expecting them to carry my investement on the web part, which is a bit unfair to be honest...

Their service is great, their product is great; for me, this service has been awesome... So I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and just pay the damn hostname forwarding... After all, what is 10 €/month for their service; if I can not make 10€/month profit for a website, I should probably shut it down anyway... Yes, I could do hosting for a cheaper amount, but that would mean I can not use all their infrastructure, and would probably have to manage the server myself etc...

As I was writing this article, I managed to fubar the blommekes.be instance, but they replied over twitter within a few minutes; great support !!

Conclusion

Free is great, but sometimes one has to realize that not all things can be free; everybody has to make a living, so it is quite natural people charge you for what they do..... Sometimes one has to step back and pay for the service... If every apphb member is a freeloader, their service would probably not last long. I now happily pay the 10€/month per site, and hope others will do to, so their product will stay available as their service offers great value to me....

I would like to end with a favorite quote from one of my friends:

You pay peanuts, you get the monkeys !!!

Laters !