Why is Metal not offered for single instance deploys? Our app does not need this kind of uptime. We would be happy with a node going down once in a while (no data loss, of course) with a little bit of downtime to save 66% on the cost of running 2 additional nodes that will never see action.
It's a durability thing, we need to make sure writes are replicated off to at least one node. There might be avenues to get Metal down to single node in the future.
I definitely think there are use-cases out there which are fine with daily backups. Not every use-case requires high availability or high durability.
Even to take a case in point where durability is irrelevant - people building caches in Postgres (so as to only have one datastore / not need Redis as well). Not a big deal if the cache blows up - just force everyone to login again. Would love to see the vendor reduce complexity on their end and pass through the savings to the customer.
edit: per your other reply re. using replication to handle resizing, maybe being upfront with customers about additional latency / downtime being necessary with single-node discounts, then for resizing you could break connections, take a backup, then restore the backup on a resized node?
Do such small caps on CPU/RAM mean that multiple customers are sharing the same server? Is there concern for noisy neighbors here, either IOPS or in case another customer's workload grows to take the full available storage on the NVMe? What kind of downtime would be needed to switch to a larger size?
We've engineered in protections from noisy neighbors in both CPU and I/O usage and we do not over-commit resources.
If your or another customer's workload grows and needs to size up we launch three whole new database servers of the appropriate size (whether that's more CPU+RAM, more storage, or both), restore the most recent backups there, catch up on replication, and then orchestrate changing the primary.
Downtime when you resize typically amounts to needing to reconnect i.e. it's negligible.
Wow. The guy is a jerk and a liar. The board at PlanetScale needs to get this guy off the internet. He's too much of an asshole to be seen in public.
I have no real horse in this race. I know how to manage my own databases, but I do have people asking me about PlanetScale and asking me to use it for certain projects, and I will absolutely never do so now.
This is the bloody pricing page. If I as the CEO of a SaaS startup don't even know what our pricing page says I should step down. That's our offer, that's the most important page we have. Come on now. Writing "free forever" isn't something some rogue marketing intern does, this is a core positioning decision and something you'd absolutely be part of, if not leading, as the founder.
What are you arguing about? People send you web archive links and you're still stubborn enough to say that it wasn't the case. Shame to even see you here, just shows what kind of company you are from the inside.
Were we supposed to just keep it up until we go out of business or something? Out of sheer duty. Like burn everything we built to the ground to keep the free tier going as long as possible? Endlessly indentured to provide a free service on the internet for people that will never pay us money so that the people that do pay us money can eventually have to move provider too because we are shutting down?
I didn't enjoy doing it. I felt bad but I don't regret it at all.
Fair take I guess, but my curiosity wants me to ask how big were the costs of the free tier that it was trying to make you shut down..
Do you feel as if people were abusing the free tier ? Was the only solution according to PlanetScale be to close the free tier entirely? How much were the people actually using the service (like out of 100 people who signed up, how many people were constantly utilizing it till its fullest) or ( maybe abusing it even)
If lets say that you could build your company once again or you could start planetscale from its beginnings, would you still take this decision before it was big, since I feel like as if the free tier was a key part in atleast giving PlanetScale some name/fame.
I can understand how you feel but I just feel like there were a lot of people who were advocates of your software, partially because of how people could test it out for free as well and those advocates were the one who were hurt the most. Personally, I wasn't involved but I would pretty bummed too if I advocate a service and it does something like this, although, I would still understand the situation.
Yes, that was the promise you made. You said 'besides our commercial offering we're going to support your personal projects you run out of passion, forever' and then you changed it to 'actually, we're going to delete your passion projects unless you pay us money'.
You should absolutely regret making that promise. As I understand it you're wrapping hardware at AWS and GCP, and likely have since the beginning, so you should absolutely have understood that this was a bad promise because it was dependent on recurring costs towards those suppliers that you did not have control over.
It is both strange, fascinating but also wired and scary to watch all of these unfold in real life. Not just on the internet.
In pre 2010 era, we all knew Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Storage was marketing and no one believes it. There is some sort of limit, and as long as we dont get caught it is fine. Free "forever" offering, Unlimited were all best effort. And It isn't just tech, but also politics. I mean they all say it but most wouldn't believe it.
And then we have a whole new generation of people who dont have this as norm anymore. They do believe everything should be free and could be free. Utopia is just around the corner. The cost of anything is so abstracted and muddled they have no idea why anything is priced as such.
Sure, it sounds like a marketing mistake, and you're owning up to it not being sustainable.
But you're burning trust with people before they even have a relationship with your company if you pretend it never happened.
It's much better to say "Sorry non-customers, this wasn't sustainable. I hope this new approach will better serve us both in the hobby use case and still be sustainable!"
Its hard shutting down services and nobody wants to do it. I've been there as a CTO and co-founder, but you made the right decision. Glad to see the new $5 plan because, imo, Planetscale is the best database to build with for majority of applications.
as much as I question why someone would trust a free "forever" offer, I have a lot more questions about a company that is denying what's in the public record.
