A couple of months ago I wrote about how we had decided to use Ruby on Rails to build OpenIndie. One of my goals for December was to research and select a hosting provider that had a elastic hosting solution but could also offer us some experience in the world of Rails hosting. Today after more than a month of research and testing we have chosen to host the site with Engine Yard Cloud.
First of all I’d like to thank Tom Mornini for noticing a tweet I put out asking for hosting recommendations and in turn offering me a trial period on the platform. And, thank you to Abheek Anand and Ezra Zygmuntowicz for answering my many many questions over the last few weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever had better customer service.
But why did we choose Engine Yard Cloud (EYC)? Well, first of all you’ve got one of your answers right there in the last paragraph:
Amazing customer service: I’ve never experienced such attentive, fast and thorough customer service in my life. I’m not paying for a support package yet I get near instant replies both on their support site and via Twitter. Impressive!
People who care: I follow Tom, Abheek, Ezra and a few other employees of EY on Twitter and they all seem to genuinely give a damn about Ruby, Rails, the community and their product.
Reliability/Scalability/Flexibility: EYC is built upon Amazon’s elastic hosting solution EC2 providing the reliability, scalability and flexibility OpenIndie needs.
Expertise: The combination of the above reliability and expertise isn’t matched in the market as far as I can see. They are targeting a niche market by making a incredibly powerful platform like EC2 available at the flick of a switch. And, they really know their shit. In my dealings with their staff, especially Ezra, they really know what they’re doing.
Simplicity: Finally, the key, it is simple and headache free. Site’s under load? I can bring up a couple of new instances with the press of a button. Need a new staging environment that mirrors exactly the data and configuration of my production environment? Log into EYC, press a button, I have what I need. Simple.
EYC’s main competitors in my decision making was the choice of going direct to Amazon and managing everything myself or RackSpace Cloud. Obviously EC2 is an amazing platform which EYC is built upon but, frankly, I just can’t afford the time to be messing with server configuration and in the end RackSpace’s product just didn’t compare to EYC.
I’d like to point out that I haven’t received cash in a brown envelope or a kick back in the form of free hosting from Engine Yard - I’ve just received excellent service and thought it was worth blogging about. I’ll write another post about my experience with EYC one month after launch.
Kieran Masterton
OpenIndie Co-Founder
