Posts Tagged ‘google app engine’

head in the clouds

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

(originally posted September 16th, 2008)

Recently I went to an amazon web service thing up in salt lake.  Turns out the cloud (they say) is all the rage.  Folks doing pretty well everything in the cloud.  I recently moved the start of holaservers to google app engine.  Here is a before pic

Pretty well every non-S3 thing was a single point of failure.

And now

So, for a bit of work, I have a highly available front page.  And for some reason, it is free until I start getting like five million hits a month.  Yeah, not really bumping up to that.

At the aws thing, I learned that I could do all my holaservers stuff in their cloud.  Didn’t really think I could do ftp or kind of hard web serving via my own custom apache, but yeah, can totally do both.  Sounds like EC2 can pretty well just give me a virtual opensolaris box.  I am kind of tempted to start moving stuff on over.  Besides a pretty big aws learning curve, and quite a bit of work, I would have to start putting out $72 a month, which won’t really be happening till I make some money or become a startup finalist.  Think I find out on October 3rd.

Earl

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

a little marketing music

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

(originally posted September 8th, 2008)

Well, am finally going to give it a little bit of a go.  I just posted HolaServers to the Google App Engine Gallery, and you can hopefully see me here.  Wonder if I will get my first real signup based from it.  I have analytics going (actually just added a couple more pages), so I should hopefully be able to measure the deluge pretty well.  Also have the whole every hit goes into mysql going, so we shall see.  I am afraid of spammers or inappropriate contenters, but there you go.

I also entered the Amazon Startup Challenge for HolaServers and good old LogHelper, which it turns out, I haven’t blogged about.  Well, won’t that be an awesome entry.  I figure I have a decent shot at making the finals, which would mean at least $5000 in amazon aws credits.  That would turn out the be real money, since I will be paying out of pocket for S3 as I am getting started.  Also, I would quite like to have my mysql hosted on say EC2, which it looks like is getting more doable daily.  Not sure how they ensure that your mysql daemon stays up.  To do such a thing directly with amazon is like $72 / month (ten cents / hour * 24 hours / day * 30 days / month).  Not too bad once I am getting upgrades, but to start, I think it rather prohibitive.  My co-lo is only like $100 per month and that’s for 2U of servers.  Winning the contest and getting 50k in cash and 50k in credits would also be cool.

So lately I have been trying to get the styles to line up a bit better and though I am not all done, I would feel pretty hopeless without good old firebug.  With firebug you can mouse through the dom and the browser highlights what you’re over.  Also, coming from a guy who used to make a living reading some not so good perl, css is a bit hard to read / follow.  Guess I would get better at such things, but I am not there yet.

Are the next generations of designers going to be great at design, html / css, javascript, templates and the like?  Can someone point me in the direction of some such person?  I would really like to be able to set someone up with eclipse, python and getting holaservers working on their laptop, have the mythical designer edit the templates and commit them when they’re done.  Is that so wrong?

Enjoy,

Earl

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »