Agreed. Additionally, some business models simply don't mesh with cloud infrastructure pricing no matter the volume. There are definitely advantages to using cloud services, but most of the time bare metal gets you more hardware/performance at a lower cost in the long run, even when you factor in everything else that it entails.
The thing people forgets, is that the cloud provider have the same issues and expences. That cost is passed on to the clients. Now they may be more efficient ect. but once you reach a certain scale, and it's less that people think, you might as well get it done in house if you can find qualified people.
How can people forget, when that cost is right there in the price tag? If anything, it's easier to overlook the costs of running your own hardware, since they aren't immediately apparent.
My experience is that people don't understand cloud pricing at all.
First of all they tend to not look at monthly prices, and are seduced into thinking their instances are cheap. Secondly they are seduced itnto thinking they are spending less ops time, though in my experience it's the reverse. Thirdly, people "forget" about extras like bandwidth costs (which are extortionate at all the big cloud providers), extra storage volumes etc.
Then when people get the bill, it often gets back-rationalised as being ok because it's cloud so it must be cheap.
The greatest innovation AWS did was finding a way to get people to pay absolutely insane rates for hosting.
They simply underestimate the ops cost, and often focus on the monthly cost. The thing that cloud providers like AWS are good at, and IMO, the only reason you should choose them, is when you have highly variable loads. Dynamic scaling is something only they can do because they have such a massive scale. Even if you're relative small and cannot justify hiring a sysadmin, there are plenty of consults out there you can hire.
> If their business model relies on knowing more, then they chose a lousy business model.
I must disagree. I certainly understand a desire for privacy and it's definitely within your right to block GA if you feel so inclined, but to assume that sites using GA to track visitors is some sort of shady business model is simply not true.
I've used GA and Heap (Analytics) to obtain extremely granular information about how users traverse a website. This information can be invaluable to businesses in order to understand the thought process that people go through on a website. The underlying goal may be more conversions (sales), but simply using and analyzing data from GA or any other analytics platform isn't going to magically force you to purchase my product/service. These types of insights help identify critical issues with your website - issues such as pages with information that isn't as clear as it could be, or other possible barriers preventing users from signing up. This can be purely technical (i.e. a bug on a specific page), or it could be a lack of information/understanding about your product or service, or many other possibilities.
If you don't trust Google or other similar companies with your data, then you're welcome to block them from tracking you. But I personally don't believe that you should equate the use and analysis of such tracking data as evil in every instance, because it's not.
I agree that GA can be useful to site owners for things other than advertising and shady optimizations. The use cases you describe are all totally valid in my mind. However, and it seems that you agree with me here, those use cases don't require that 100%, or even 50% of visitors allow GA to run. All you need is a decent sample size.
Of course the sample won't be representative any more since people who block GA probably have attributes in common. But people who block GA probably aren't who you want your site optimized for anyway, I suppose.
I don't view GA (and similar) as intrinsically harmful. I just don't believe I'm materially hurting anyone doing something legitimate by blocking it.
> I personally don't believe that you should equate the use and analysis of such tracking data as evil in every instance, because it's not.
We know it's not evil - it's just business. However, plenty of businesses are built around anti-consumer practices.
I personally don't mind someone tracking me on their own domain. Javascript trackers are terrible for security and performance reasons, though I'd tolerate them. I don't like 3rd-party trackers, though, for many reasons:
1. Part of the selling point of using those third-party trackers is being able to quantify what type of user/consumer I am. That's why they track across multiple sites - to provide their customers the highest value. So that they can charge a higher per-unit price.
2. There's no guarantee that such data is only shared with the sites accessed. Even if it was made at the point of use, they can retroactively change that without contacting the user because its their customer who signs the agreement. Most will just click yes without thinking of their user's privacy.
3. If the business sells, merges, changes leadership or goes bankrupt that data policy is as worthless as your trust in it. Look at RadioShack's attempt to sell customer data despite promises not to. Or any company who changed their TOS after a buyout. They don't wipe data from people who don't agree because that data is part of the "company value".
I admit that GA makes a lot of site maintenance and analysis easy. However, I'm not particularly interested in making your job of selling to people easier at my own expense. Particularly when alternatives exist for people who know what they're doing. Yes, it's not malicious behavior, no, but it is extremely discourteous and occasionally sensitive to disclose interest to a third-party.
Think about it like this. Let's say I go to a dealership to look at cars because I like looking at cars. I love engines and wheels and stuff. I only speak with the sales guy, who really seems like a pretty nice person. But the company contracts with some guy who is watching me the entire time for "analytics". After I leave, he tells my bank, the IRS, my wife, my boss and my cousin who asked me to loan him money (but I sensibly declined because he never pays anyone back) because they know him and this guy can't and won't keep his mouth shut. The next day, my bank preemptively reviews my credit history for a car loan, I'm being contacted for an audit out of suspicions of hiding money, my wife is asking me to buy her something because we've apparently got money, and my cousin is livid that I'm somehow filthy rich but I won't give him $10K to invest in a critical MLM deal. It's his big ticket and he'll have it back to me in 3 weeks. Well, 2 months, tops.
Your intentions don't matter at all with 3rd-party analytics because that 3rd party will never respect those intentions. It's not in their contract and thus not their concern what you intend or promise. Plus, their lawyers regularly update it when the company finds new business models to exploit. Not only that, you don't care enough about me to actively review your vendor contracts to make sure your "good intentions" are being followed by your contractors. You're only using the service because it makes your job easier. Why would you go out of your way to do extra work? You don't have any bad intentions, after all.
It doesn't have to be evil or malicious to be exploitative. It's not like third-world factories with terrible labor conditions exist because the owner likes to kick puppies. It's about money, at the end, and businesses will do as much as they can get away with for money.
"Hola is a collaborative internet -- it works by sharing the idle resources of its users for the benefit of all."
"Hola built a peer to peer overlay network for HTTP, which securely routes the sites you choose through other Hola users' devices and not through expensive servers."
This is just another reason why you should always be aware of the services that you're using, especially when it could concern your security and privacy.
Stripe doesn't accept every credit/debit card out there and can often cause charges to be declined for ambiguous reasons. In my experience, PayPal doesn't have this issue. PayPal is also a preferred payment option by a lot of customers and visitors, believe it or not. We still have a lot of customers who refuse to use any payment option other than PayPal, which is honestly really disappointing. Removing support for PayPal would mean losing a lot of customers.
