

Engine Yard takes $15m Series B Round from NEA, Amazon and Benchmark - luccastera
http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/07/14/engine-yard-takes-15mill-series-b-round-from-nea-amazon-and-benchmark

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michaelbuckbee
It's a little confusing with their branding, but this money isn't really for a
Ruby "hosting" company, but for their other software offerings and development
(Merb, Rubinus, Vertebrae).

~~~
ezmobius
Someone gets it ;)

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mynameishere
<http://engineyard.com/hosting>

    
    
      Monthly cost per slice 	$399.00
      Setup cost per slice 	$299.00
    

_Prices are for a single application deployed on a slice. Each additional
application installed on your slice is an additional $50 per month per slice
with a $100 setup fee_

Pricey. Is it that hard to administer RoR apps?

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mdasen
It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the
web generally speaking.

Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails and it's
infrastructure that costs a lot of money.

Examples:

Remote Backups every 24 hours. That means a server in a different data center,
the bandwidth, and the work involved in setting up and managing the backups.

Remote website monitoring. That means a server in a different data center
hitting the site to make sure nothing is down. Money and time to deal with
that.

Database replication. A large PITA is taken care of on your choice of MySQL
4/5 or PostgreSQL 8.2.

If you add that together, the price doesn't seem as steep. Database
replication means two boxes. The offsite backup adds another box and you could
always stick the offsite monitoring on that same box. So, now you're at three
boxes and I don't think it's crazy to be spending $300 on three boxes. Of
course, with EngineYard, you don't have to do any of the setup work and you
have the ability to scale more easily. In that setup, there is no load
balancer so as you need more capacity, you then have to deal with a load
balancer as well as another application server.

The price is a bit of a premium, but not as much as you might think. Mostly,
it's just more than what most developers are used to. I'm used to setting
myself up on a slicehost slice. I don't have database replication, offsite
monitoring, offsite backups, or hardware redundancy. If that box kicks, my
site goes down until they can get it running on another box. It hasn't
happened to me and I've been a customer for over a year, but it is a
possibility. EngineYard is about eliminating those possibilities. That's
expensive, but if you're trying to deploy a site that is your business and not
your hobby, you should probably look at EngineYard.

EngineYard is about being able to tell potential investors that they don't
have to worry about architecture - and have the goods to back it up. I'm a
decent sysadmin, but not like people for whom it's there job. I can get
Apache, mod_rails, mongrel, nginx, etc. up and running, but sometimes you just
want to _know_ that things are set up solidly from people who have a lot more
experience than you do.

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petercooper
Related: <http://www.rubyinside.com/engine-yard-takes-15-mill-951.html>

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tlrobinson
Interesting that Amazon is investing in them... they're sort of an EC2
competitor.

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nuclear_eclipse
If I get the idea correctly, Amazon isn't investing in EY; Amazon is investing
in development of general Ruby technology that benefits everyone in the
Ruby/Rails communities, including Amazon and EY.

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callmeed
Awesome. My company is in the process of moving one of our apps over to EY
now.

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acangiano
This is absolutely great.

