A significant number of users launch test instances on Phacility, in the form of `<organization>test` or `<username>test` or `testphab` or just `try<random letters>` or `test<random letters>`. Of the last 100 instances launched, 22 contained the string "test".
These instances will obviously never become permanent or paying instances since no one is going to stick with an instance called `joetest`. In many cases, the administrator later launches an `<organization>` instance without the "test" part and that sometimes becomes a permanent paid instance, so this behavior isn't bad, but it seems like there may be room for improvement.
The number of instances isn't huge or anything and the cost of these instances is nearly nothing, so this isn't an immediate issue, but addressing this need better might both give users a better experience and make operations a little easier.
- For example, one thing we could try is a big "New Test Instance" button which just gives you a random `test29823.phacility.com` sort of instance that we tear down after 48 hours.
- These instances could even be prepopulated with data, basically on-demand demo instances.
- We could let you launch them without needing to login at all, maybe? Not sure there's much value in this, but one thing I really liked about Stripe is that you can get a functional account without even registering. This is harder for us, but not necessarily impossible.
- We could conceivably streamline registration in general (auto-register you with a random newuser1923 username, let you look around and launch a demo instance, require you to pick a username before you launched a real instance). Not sure how valuable this really is, but maybe worthwhile.