[NTLUG:Discuss] FREE server for developers

[Preston Hagar]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 5:16 PM, Carlos Wesbrooks <cwesbrooks at gmail.com>wrote:

> If you haven’t already heard, today marks the launch of “The Planet Sand
> Castle.” The new program invites software developers to apply for a free
> dedicated server from The Planet for one full year – no strings attached.
> The Dual Xeon servers we’re providing the approved applicants will enable
> them to build and test their software in an enterprise environment, so they
> can finally power down the ancient desktop computers they’ve been using for
> their sandbox development environments.
>
>
>
<snip>

My question would be what happens after 1 year?  You have a full year's
worth of development, configuration, testing, etc. in this one server and
then your free ride is up.  I completely understand that The Planet can't
give away free servers for ever, but I would be hesitant to really use the
server without either some kind of idea of the costs after the free year is
up, or some "escape plan" where I could easily move my code to another
server.  From the looks of the prices on their site:

https://www.theplanet.com/servers/all/

it looks like a server in the ballpark of what they describe would be
somewhere in the $200-$250 a month range.  That seems like it would be quite
a bit for a 1 year old project/company (from my understanding of the
requirements, it has to a new domain published within your first six
months).

It is nice that The Planet is making a generous offer to new projects, I
just would want to know what happens after a year ahead of time.

Just my 2 cents.

Preston