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Over last several months I’ve been developing a cloud computing (IaaS) comparison engine. I’ve reached a state where it achieved some usefulness. Therefore I would like to share it with you and get some feedback before I go any further with it.
http://www.cloudorado.com/ (it may not work without www yet).
The service is something like pricegrabber.com for cloud computing – you specify resources you need for cloud servers and it will present offers from multiple providers.
It is done in GWT + SmartGWT. I’ve chosen this technology, since it allows client side calculations, without network and server delays. Therefore you can use sliders and see how prices change without any delay. There is one side effect though – it is quite big to load. So to minimize the negative effect of loading at start I present a static version (widgets does not work at all), which is replaced with actual interactive version as soon as it loads up. You shouldn’t even notice it, unless you try using sliders or links before it actually boots up. Probably this is a good subject for another article.
Going back to the feedback I have several areas that bothers me, so I would really appreciate if you could take them into account.
1. Usefulness: Would the site be useful for you if you planned to buy cloud server? What should be added, what is irrelevant? Is the missing thing crucial enough to prevent me from going further?
2. Ease of use: Is it simple enough to understand it without explanation?
3. Name: I’m not a native English speaker, so it is difficult for me to judge how a name sounds for natives and if it easy to remember. The other top candidates were cloudcruncher.com and cloudcomparator.com . Huge advantage for cloudorado.com is that there are virtually no results in Google for that. Which would you choose?
4. Business model – I mostly plan to earn on cloud providers’ affiliate programs or charge per click. Which of those you think would be better? Any other ideas?
Obviously I don’t think the service is done now, but hopefully something like alpha would apply. Therefore feedback is really critical at this point and I really appreciate any comments. I hope it will save me some dead ends.
Thank you!
Marcin