My latest addition to my desk, a Wall-E RC Robot.
I love to surround my desk with statues and other memorabilia of stuff I like, gives it a bit of color and it’s source of entertainment 
Wall-E Robot
Piggy Bank
I hate to carry coins, so every night I tend to empty my pockets of any coins I accumulated during the day, so as such, I noticed I was starting to gather quite a few handfuls of coins all around the apartment, it was time for a Piggy bank
And this is it, over 2 feet tall, probably will hold quite a few hundred quid when full, if I timed it correctly, should be read to empty just around XMAS .. the girls will like that 
Pricing Wars
A couple of weeks ago, we announced the final pricing for VPS.NET .. this was not an easy exercise either, it took allot of work and study to determine what prices we had to set that where both attractive to customers while at the same time ensuring our product was profitable.
But it seems that for some people we might have as well put a few prices on a cork-board and trow darts at it, where it landed .. that was the price.
It’s not that simple, when pricing a product of this magnitude (a Cloud) one needs first to gather all the costs associated with deploying and maintaining the product, then you need to account for the growth period (remember, one will deploy a cloud system that costed millions of dollars to setup, but you will have 0 clients that first day .. with $0 revenue incoming), it takes months, sometimes years, to recuperate initial costs, while at the same time you have staff and ongoing expenses that ned to be meet as well.
Not, if you compare the traditional VPS market, a traditional VPS provider will buy or lease a server, costing a few hundred dollars to a few thousand and sell out “chunks” of that server, very minimal initial capex and usually they will break even within weeks.
How in the world then do people expect Cloud computing to be priced identical to standard VPS ?, it’s simple .. in general people dont !, those who cannot afford it do !.
It seems that we have now a new generation of people that believe if there is something in the internet that they cannot afford it, then the price is wrong, sorry, but thats not the case, sometimes your budget only really allows for mediocre.
I have instead focused on asking those people who “actually” signed up and their reaction could not be any more different, they love the product and they believe (like us) the pricing is actually it’ strongest point, the initial cost these days for anybody to get into a cloud setup is the hundreds of dollars per month, we reduced it to $30 !!!.
My team and I get demoralized when we read of people blasting us because we dont match the price of a traditional VPS setup, and for a while we did try to see if the math added up, could be be any cheaper ?, no, it does not add up, why would we sell at a loss ?, we are competitively priced and will stop dwelling on what a few leeches are screaming about and concentrate on providing a great product for those people who see the real value of our offering.
I too sometimes browse ebay for that elusive DB9 for a VW Bug price … but it’s just not going to happen.
Sunset
In the Manchester train admiring this gorgeous sunset
– Post From My iPhone
Persistence pays off … sort of
Who says thieves dont work hard ? here is a good example of how desperate fraudster are, this gem of a person utilized 7 different credit cards until one went thru.
The appalling thing is the last one’s details where so good, and the owner is most certainly still oblivious that the cars is stolen, that the anti-fraud systems had no problem passing it thru :p
We are implementing stronger fraud checking, but this is scary, imagine how many cards that a-hole must have ….
Bah … Sliced .. you wish
No comment needed…
VPS.NET … finally !
It’s been many months of hard work, countless revisions of code and design and an incredible amount of people and feedback, but finally last night we released VPS.NET.
Ok, we calling it a “Public Beta”, but it only means we are still missing a few bits, what’s there is solid and working fine !
I am incredibly proud with what we achieved there, going “Cloud” for a VPS setting was a risky new idea, but once that once it sunk in, we knew we had a winner, and above all, we knew we had cracked the trend of things to come.
Now I wish I could say it’s “DONE” .. but it’s not yet, still have loads of ideas and cool features to add, man this has been fun
A grand design .. better see some awards for it !!
Paris Daytrip
I just returned from Paris, I went there with Tom for a meeting with Patrick about a new UK2 project.
The weather was just great, so we did a bit of walking, unfortunately I should have wore more sensible shoes, my feet are killing me now :p
Here are a few pics of oddities we saw around town.
— Post From My iPhone
Cubans ?
Once in a while I do enjoy the occasional Cigar, when I lived in the US I was allways disappnted I could not get hold (legitimally at least) of Cuban cigars.
I remember the US cigar affictionado magazine Propaganda for the south American variety as a better alternative (BS !!!)
So as I wait for a bus in London and I see the Cubans readily available in front of me, I wonder how much longer it will be until we see these kind of adverts in the US
New Car – Grand Picasso
Last week we had our mechanic check the Multipla for a service and MOT, unfortunately due to Sally’s abuse, the car failed the MOT and the mechanic advise us to just get a new one instead of fixing all the little things that needed fixing.
So today we went to FOW and I leased her a nice Citroen C4 Grand Picasso 2.0HDi VTR+.. and the bonus, it’s Automatic
We will pick it up next saturday, it will be a good timing as we are off to Paris on April 1st.
I just hope she wont dent this one too soon … lady needs to learn how to drive :p
