Our wiki is brand new this week, so I am glad you like it! If you haven't seen already, you can click on the 'see it in action' button to see a gif that walks you through lots of the setup steps. We'll definitely think about your suggestion for the tour page though. Thanks for the feedback :)
We have also got a brand new wiki with lots of information, and we'll be continuing to add a lot more to it over the next few weeks: https://github.com/jumpstarter-io/help/wiki
We won't be charging people extra or forcing them to change their plan if you have a sudden influx of visits from Hacker News or another site. We will consider that a temporary traffic spike and we will be happy that you are in the spotlight rather than trying to charge you more! The plans are based on your usual monthly usage, so if you continued to get the same number of requests monthly, we would talk to you at that point about upgrading.
That has indeed been the way for many years and a valid worry. And yet, we're changing it. A lot of hosting companies are white labelled without any major differences.
Our tech was completely written from the ground up to combat this. As said in the marketing materials; if you have a spike, we handle it fine. We've done intensive testing to make sure that being linked to from Hacker News, or anywhere else that gives you a big influx of traffic, won't make your server go down.
We wrote this because we too were tired of the landscape, and we wanted people like ourselves not to have to suffer with this anymore.
It's all relative. We save you time, and make sure your service is always up. We work with you through any pain points you have. If your server goes down, and you lose an hour of your time. You've already lost that difference.
You also assume nothing is cached, whereas only if those were all uniques would that be likely. Which is generally unlikely.
Our price is based around quality. Both the fact that we grow with you, and the fact that we strive to make every task you need to do, ridiculously easy.
Yes. However, it's not a VPS service. The file system is automatically managed by Jumpstarter and upgraded without downtime. The idea of no root access is not to limit you, but because you shouldn't have to worry about administration - we handle it all.
You never have to worry about if other people are being resource intensive for one major reason. And if you got Hacker News'd, rather than punishing you and everyone else – we'd instead give you more resources to deal with it :)
Wordpress is getting increasingly better at keeping requests lower. And it's all up to a user how they optimise; they can get it down to just a couple of requests if they wish.
I ran out of time to reply to every comment yesterday, but as Faruk linked to this as one of his best comments, I thought I would take the time to reply now.
The example of African Americans carrying the legacy of slavery with them is not a fair comparison to women. African Americans are a group of people who, whilst now large and diverse, mostly share a common history which in the grand scheme of things was not all that long ago. You could use Native Americans or Jewish people as similar examples. Women don't have a shared history in the same way. Women have suffered terribly throughout history (and in some countries they still do now) by either horrible violence, being treated by second class citizens or both. However there was no one cultural atrocity which affected all women.
I'm aware of ways in which women have been persecuted. I'm also aware of how people have been persecuted based on race, religion, sexuality, age. Those things all contribute to my understanding of history, and I think it's extremely important not to ignore them, but not ignoring them, and not being weighed down thinking about them every day are very different things.
Stories like you describe - I can honestly say that I don't have a story like that. It might be that I've been extremely fortunate and I'm in a small minority. It might also be that I try very hard not to jump to conclusions. I don't want to unfairly judge people based on what is probably an entire harmless gesture, but I completely understand why other women do. When writing my post I started to wonder if I was weird because I didn't fear being raped. If the article could have that effect on me, isn't it possible that articles and comments like this are actually detrimental to that problem?
Finally, I don't think that "I'm concerned about the gender gap in tech. I think it's an important thing for us to be talking about" was what the original article was about. It's probably what the original intention of the article was, but it's not how the article turned out. I actually see the gender gap talked about a lot (both by women and men). I barely go a day without seeing someone or other talk about it on Twitter. My Twitter feed clearly is by no means a representation of the whole industry as a) there is a definite bias towards UXers and designers, and b) it's an entirely self-selected list on my part. However it does show that these discussions are already happening, amongst some communities at least, on a regular basis.
I think that an article that was truly about the gender gap in tech would actually talk about the gender gap in tech. There were so many issues that the article actually could have talked about - disparity in pay, women being overlooked for promotions, women getting unfairly let go or not hired because of pregnancy, women finding that their opinions are ignored or not even asked for, women feeling left out because the guys go for drinks after work and they're not asked to go with. The article did briefly touch on speakers at conferences, but for me personally that's a less important issue. I go to conferences a couple of times a year; I go to the office 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year, and issues like pay and promotions affect my whole life.
That last paragraph is something I regret not putting in my original post as it helps to demonstrate that I was not criticising the intention of writing the article; I was criticising the way it was written and the things that it chose to concentrate on.
I'm fully aware I've been in the industry for 6 months. I said so, very clearly, in my post. I wanted very much to make sure that people knew that I have only been in the industry a short time but this was my experience so far. Frankly I find the idea that just because someone has a small amount of experience their opinion is invalid ridiculous and insulting. The only reason a newcomer's opinion might not be worth listening to is if they are pretending they have a wealth of experience. At no point did I do that.
I can only assume that the 2 years as a movie usher you're referring to is the 2 years as a teenager I spent volunteering at my local non-profit cinema whilst also doing my A-level exams and working a part-time job. I'm pretty sure the only place this is even mentioned online is on my LinkedIn profile, at the absolute bottom, after you would have scrolled past the various jobs I have held in sales and marketing, and local government (where as I mentioned in the post, I did in fact experience some sexism).
As for the final comment, I did indeed reread the article several hours later, before I wrote my post, to ensure that I still felt the same way. I actually found MORE that I disagreed with on a second read-through.
I'd like to hear a version from someone who has been in the industry a lot longer too. I specifically added the section at the bottom explaining that I hadn't been in the industry all that long so I wasn't pretending to be speaking from a much more experienced position than I am. From the comments I've received so far there are definitely women who have been in the industry a lot longer than I have that share my point of view though.
I very much agree in general. I often feel like people would be better off just getting on with their work rather than wasting their time discussing some of these issues. In this case though I just felt so strongly that the article was patronising and sensationalist that I felt something needed to be said.