> get a excellent magazine running profitable in less then one month
That is primarily due to his large influential niche audience and friends in the tech media. Joe Schmoe could do the same thing, better, but without that free media exposure it would go nowhere, lost in the open sea that is the App Store.
Interesting. I think this could be particularly popular if Linode introduces some fully supported stacks for common configs. Although at that point they would really just become a managed provider, but perhaps that is the natural progression of at least part of the hosting business.
Your skill set is strong and in demand, you have nothing to worry about. Enjoy the holidays and treat this as unpaid time off, I suspect you'll be employed before the end of next month.
What region are you in, or is remote work a requirement? Most interviewers like an in-person at some point, just a thought.
Very excited about this. Wordpress hosting for medium and large sites is a major pain point that I've dealt with on multiple occasions. Once a site grows beyond the cheapy hosting plans, there was a huge gap in the mid range before something like VIP became a possibility.
I am interested to see how existing sites migrate over, it looks like only a group of approved themes are allowed. Presumably, those looking to migrate will have to recreate their existing UI experience on one of those pre-approved themes.
The theme issue actually smells like a decent business opportunity for savvy Wordpress theme designers. If someone offers quick turnaround ports of old themes to supported themes, which is almost entirely CSS, I bet they'll get a lot of business as more and more sites want to move over to the Enterprise plan.
In my experience, Linode is the best roll-your-own you-are-on-your-own cloud provider. Obviously they are aimed at the savvy but it's reliable, cheap while being easy to estimate costs, simple to configure and expand, pretty good documentation, plus it doesn't have the learning curve or linguistic peculiarities of Amazon.
Regarding Rackspace, I've had good experience with them when working at mid-size and larger companies. Unfortunately I've had the opposite experience when functioning as a freelancer, working with startups, or as an entrepreneur myself. Rackspace didn't even respond to sales inquiries. Initially I figured this was a strangely repeated fluke, but other small companies and entrepreneurs I've spoken to have reported the exact same thing, where they send an inquiry to Rackspace or ask to speak with a sales engineer, and they get no response. Nothing, zip, nada. I find that very strange, and am speculating RS no longer wants to deal with the growing pains and frequent support requests of startups, but it certainly makes the decision to stick with Linode or EC2 much easier.
I don't have much experience with dedicated anymore, but have repeatedly heard good things about ServInt and SingleHop. Have also heard good things about Firehost for a managed cloud provider. I would love to hear others opinion and experience on any of the aforementioned companies though.