Here is an old post of mine from two years ago. Paul’s post has a lot more current info in it, but this might be of interest/value to others:

http://www.scottburkett.com/index.php/technology/2007-01-08/scaling-your-technology-with-your-business.html

Cheers.
Scott

1) I’m kind of in a similar situation, I work from home by myself all day, but I’m always wired up via Campfire to Calvin so it’s very easy to bounce ideas back and forth and get quick feedback/help. Definitely more efficient.

2) Well I finished all the requirements and submitted them.. so we’ll see what happens!

Fantastic article. As I told you before man, these blogs are really inspiring to us guys with our own start ups. I’ve been working on mine since January, and hopefully the private beta version will be out by May (fingers crossed), so I haven’t had to deal with scaling yet. However, I know that will be the case in the future, and it’s nice to know that I can come back here to read up on where to start.

Couple questions:

1. Right now I am a solo act…How do you like working with a team?
2. How did the GRA/TAG Business Launch competition go?

Like I said, love these posts. Keep them up!

Malcolm

That being said, if we had to host elsewhere and had the money, I
would definitely opt for a complete EC2 setup. I’ve tinkered with ec2 in
the past before and they’ve done some amazing things in the last year that make it a
great platform.

Paul

Also, what about Amazon EC2? You can scale easily with them and with their Elastic Block Store (EBS) it’s easy to operate MySQL with simple backups of disk-based data stores.

Anyway, Skribit is cool, good luck! Thanks for your blog on scaling, it’s interesting.

Thanks for stopping by!

I know Twitter has moved their message queuing system to Scala because Ruby just couldn’t handle the load. Also, the creator of the Lift framework (a Scala web framework) claimed to get a 20x performance boost using Lift instead of Rails.

That’s pretty cool! I’m really liking the way you’re adding to Skribbit all the time. I likely need to upgrade my widget.

So are you daring enough to show your business plan to the word?

Have you considered switching to Apache, Passenger and Enterprise Ruby? I think you’ll end up being rewarded by the benefits – no more watching for Mongrel processes gone rogue etc, lower overall resources & memory usage, pages being served up quick etc. Have recently switched a few things over, and have really started noticing the benefits under high load.

Also curious if you’ve looked in to making sure that you don’t have bottlenecks with your MySQL configuration? (that is, it’s properly configured for the amount of resources you want allocated to MySQL). For that, things like mytop, Maatkit, mysqlsla and the fantastic mysqltuner.

Of course, there’s no doubt you need more than 1.3 GB ram – I’d settle for no less than 4 GB these days. Especially with the amount of dynamic content you’re serving up.

Have you looked in to totally dedicated machines? For the cost you’re paying with MT at the moment (assuming you don’t have some sort of deal with them ;)), you should be able to pick up a pretty decently spec’d server from SoftLayer – and if you use their YIPP promo code, double the RAM and HDD space for nothing.

(Keep up the blog posts like these – love them and love hearing about what other people are using)

I’m currently working on two startups – one that is online-based and the other a real world, social entrepreneurial project. The latter is part of a business incubation program and we’ve spent the past several months doing a feasibility analysis, business model, financial model and writing the business plan. In other words, I feel your pain man!

We are applying to some local business plan competitions too – best of luck with yours!