22 random hints for startups: Hints 9 & 10
In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 9 & 10:
9 – Never buy hardware at list prices – Never
As said in the last post, we bought a development server at CHF 7’000 for increased flexibility. The official price was way over CHF 10’000.
The hardware business compares quite often more to an oriental bazaar than to everyday low prices of your local supermarket. Also hardware vendors like Dell, IBM, HP know list prices. But it is like on the bazaar in Marrakesh: People paying list prices are tourists.
How to get a discount? Compare offerings, ask straight for startup rebates, and if all this doesn’t help, announce an imminent order two days before the current quarter ends, but only if we can talk price again…
10 – It’s a virtual world
So, you bought your fat server; now what? Employ virtualization. The concept is long known: Emulate or “virtualize” on a fat server another computer.
Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments.
Sure you loose a bit of performance because the virtualization software mimics the actual physical hardware. With ever faster machines and ever more memory this is no roadblock to virtualization. There are however three big gains: Less space, a more flexible development environment, and less initial investment.
