Blogging from Inside the New Media Revolution

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post about Amazon´s EC2 cluster, and the reasons we did not use it to host our products. In short, we did not have the experience to design and set up a cluster that would provide the stability and reliability we wanted to provide our future clients. We did not want to have to deal with an IT staff. We just wanted to develop our products, and let our clients use them.

We began our search looking for a Canadian company. No such luck. After a surprisingly difficult search, we came upon EngineYard. As a company that focuses specifically on Rails applications, they appeared to provide everything we needed. Reasonable prices, flexible and expandable solutions, and reliable service. Based in San Francisco, but with employees all over the world, EngineYard offered 24 support. The clincher for me was when I phoned them up and asked a question regarding file storage, and they recommended to me that in my particular case S3 would be better than what they provided. An honest answer about what was best for my situation, was exactly what I was
looking for.
Once we signed up for an account the ball really got rolling. There was a brief delay until they got to my ticket (a few days), but they then delivered everything I needed to instantly deploy our product. We were up and running in about 6 hours. I want to be clear that most of the 6 hours was the tech support people holding my hand as I got the
hang of working with a deployed application. The service was outstanding, with numerous emails back and forth at all hours of the weekend.

Since the initial deployment, I have continued to be impressed. I have taken out a few low priority tickets to install gems and plug-ins on our instance. It is usually completed within a few hours. Their IRC channel is full of knowledgeable and EXPERIENCED developers, who are always happy to help.

All this for a company that is still only using a staging server. It has been a pleasure to work with them so far. I am looking forward to expanding our products on to their network.