Private Beta user here. I'll just preface this by saying that DotCloud has been the smoothest and easiest service I've used in the Heroku-umbrella of products.
That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant an account this big).
On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of) from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well. They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single site total.
TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest possible tier.
What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each:
The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new service has one service process associated with it; additional service processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan, additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional service processes are priced at $40 / month.
Whoops, I definitely miss-read the portion on services vs service processes. The beta had no concept of service processes, it would just scale out from the single service for you. I'll edit my parent comment to reflect that.
... Which now that I think about it, makes extra sites even more expensive. Beyond the 4 I'm already using for a single site, if I wanted to add a single new service for a site to hack on, I'd have to upgrade all the way to Enterprise (with all the cost it would entail). Ugh.
No, you won't have to upgrade to enterprise. You can purchase extra capacity, and allocate it to deploy as many services as you need. Those 4 services are simply what we bundle into the $99 price point.
Comments
Private Beta user here. I'll just preface this by saying that DotCloud has been the smoothest and easiest service I've used in the Heroku-umbrella of products.
That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant an account this big).
On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of) from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well. They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single site total.
TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest possible tier.
they scale nicely auto-magically
What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each:
The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new service has one service process associated with it; additional service processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan, additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional service processes are priced at $40 / month.
[1] http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/
Whoops, I definitely miss-read the portion on services vs service processes. The beta had no concept of service processes, it would just scale out from the single service for you. I'll edit my parent comment to reflect that.
... Which now that I think about it, makes extra sites even more expensive. Beyond the 4 I'm already using for a single site, if I wanted to add a single new service for a site to hack on, I'd have to upgrade all the way to Enterprise (with all the cost it would entail). Ugh.
We definitely need to make this clearer.
No, you won't have to upgrade to enterprise. You can purchase extra capacity, and allocate it to deploy as many services as you need. Those 4 services are simply what we bundle into the $99 price point.