
Engine Yard Cuts 15% Of Workforce - qhoxie
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/07/engine-yard-cuts-15-of-workforce/
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ezmobius
Yes this was mostly support staff. The main reason for this is that we have
become much more efficient and automated so we did not need as many support
staff anymore to support our systems.

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river_styx
Well, this certainly flies in the face of the sensationalist tone of the
linked article.

TechCrunch Layoff Tracker? Seriously?

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axod
"confirm that 12 out of 82 people have been let go"

They had 82 people??? Wow. That seems a lot for a relatively young startup.

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qhoxie
I could be wrong but I imagine support staff accounts for a large portion of
that.

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bprater
Often, I wonder if this kind of public news hurts them (or any company)
overall.

Would you be less tempted to use Engine Yard for hosting knowing that they
just laid off some folks? Even slightly?

And if so, would it be worth keeping these folks around just so you aren't
making "negative press" for yourself?

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qhoxie
I think it all depends on wording. EY's official blog statement talked about
helping the employees find new jobs, which is impressive. To me, it would also
be beneficial for them to include a statement like Ezra's above, to ease
customer or potential customer concerns: They laid of support staff because
they have further automated their environment - that is reassuring.

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quellhorst
Recently moved a client off engine yard that was paying ~$2600/month they are
now having substantial savings for more capacity with EC2/AWS.

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goodkarma
We're paying around $1100/month and looking to migrate off EngineYard as well
- can you point me in the right direction and/or provide any tips for a
migration to AWS?

~~~
quellhorst
Tips:

* Automate Server Configuration with Puppet

* Store your database on an EBS

* Backup often to S3

* Use cloudfront to host your most common static files (CSS, JPG, JS)

* If you don't have too much email volume, use google apps for your domain.

* Use DNSMadeEasy.com for your DNS and also failover to your backup.

* Anything that you didn't automated, document it so that its easier to automate later.

* Have a backup plan if EC2 goes down.

If you want some help with this, you could always email me dan {at} abtain
{dot} com.

