Benchmark Bets on Ruby on Rails With $3.5 Million Investment in Engine Yard | Hacker News Reader

Benchmark Bets on Ruby on Rails With $3.5 Million Investment in Engine Yard

techcrunch.com

14 pointsluccastera13 comments

We looked into hosting at EY... the prices were way too high for what they offer (you can lease several dedicated servers for the cost of a single VPS on EY).

But it's cool that they're getting the money... they'll be able to improve a lot of things for the community. Merb just might get a boost and EY now employs (at least) 4 Rubinius developers. That means that Rubinius might finally become a real alternative to MRI. Excellent!

I just looked. I'd be prepared to spend loads more on a fully managed setup like that, but the pricing is still 3-4x too high for me. $349 a month for:

- 100% utilization of 1 CPU core

- 4 Rails app servers (ie, Mongrels)

- 640 MB RAM

- Up to 250 GB/month bandwidth

- Up to 45 GB storage

- Up to 15 email accounts

- Additional RAM: $0.25/MB/month

- Additional bandwidth: $1/GB/month

- Additional storage: $1/GB/month

Quick, back of the envelope calculations suggest that I'd be paying 10x more, give or take 10%, than my current hosting costs. I max a dedicated server with both CPU and bandwidth - your mileage may vary (especially if the application isn't bandwidth intensive).

You also need to factor in redundant SAN, hardware load balancers, Master-> Slave mysql databases that do not use your slices resources. Clustered subversion, git and smtp, dns, none of which runs in your resource allocation. Databases are 4 core 4 gig ram for the master and for the slave. Offsite encrypted S3 backups every 4 hours. Worldwide team of expert rails support staff.

By the way, do you work there? You joined News.YC specifically to post this, as well as saying something subjective like "Worldwide team of expert rails support staff." is a bit suspicious.

If you do, that's great, I very much respect people who stand by their products. If you think I'm being unfair, call me on it. But please don't post anonymously. That's dishonest and disrespectful.

If you don't, false alarm. :)

I apologize, I should have said that this is my startup. I've been a long time reader of new.yc but never felt the urge to post. But I am pretty excited about what we are doing and so I was compelled to respond.

My name is Ezra and my blog is http://brainspl.at if you have any interest in what I work on.

The most exciting thing about what we are doing wasn't really covered in this article. The real news is about our Rubinius(http://rubini.us) and Merb(http://merbivore.com) projects. We are trying to improve Ruby as a platform for everyone.

No problem - thanks for being so quick to clarify!

I didn't realise that Rubinius and Merb were Engine Yard projects. That's awesome. A lot of people have been bitching about stability and scalability with Rails, kudos for stepping up and actually doing something about it.

Sure, you get a lot - which is why I said I'd be willing to pay a huge premium for it. But not that much!

Their prices are pretty outrageous, but if you don't want to ever worry about ops and deployment, they are your ticket.

"Is Ruby on Rails the next Java?"... Ah, so if Java is the next Cobol, they actually asking whether Ruby on Rails is the next Cobol? Clevah. Especially when you realize you compare framework to a language.

TechCrunch, as usual.

I guess nginx is about to go mainstream

this is awesome... congtrats EZ!

Looking forward to using Rubinius in production.

That's a real nifty logo!

Wasn't expecting that!

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