This appears to be a half-functioning project by an inexperienced but enthusiastic young person that has gotten way more attention and been taken more seriously than he imagined.
I can see myself having done something like this when I was 13 or 14, meaning well and just wanting to be involved in a startup. But I think he used a bootstrap template that made the page and product look just good enough that people here are giving it a serious evaluation as a hosting business. It is clearly not ready for serious use, but it is an interesting lesson about how wide open tech is for anyone to come along and create a business.
Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do.
The problem was the number of mistakes made:
* Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services.
* Including a racial slur in a 503 page.
* Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2.
* Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification.
* 404'd refund and legal pages.
* Not established as a LLC.
* No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS)
* Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server.
* No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all.
* Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house.
This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life.
Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.
The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges.
A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.
Comments
This appears to be a half-functioning project by an inexperienced but enthusiastic young person that has gotten way more attention and been taken more seriously than he imagined.
I can see myself having done something like this when I was 13 or 14, meaning well and just wanting to be involved in a startup. But I think he used a bootstrap template that made the page and product look just good enough that people here are giving it a serious evaluation as a hosting business. It is clearly not ready for serious use, but it is an interesting lesson about how wide open tech is for anyone to come along and create a business.
Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do.
The problem was the number of mistakes made:
* Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services.
* Including a racial slur in a 503 page.
* Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2.
* Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification.
* 404'd refund and legal pages.
* Not established as a LLC.
* No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS)
* Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server.
* No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all.
* Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house.
This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life.
Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.
The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges.
A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.