Not surprisingly, I have a keen interest in web hosting for us little guys. I was digging around on the web today and I happened upon this interview with Casey Forbes who is the co-founder and lead developer for Ravelry. Ravelry is an on-line site, community, etc for the knit and crochet community. The interview and the site are relevant to me for two reasons.
First, it’s a success that employees 3.5 people and is rolling along from concept to business in a matter of a few years. This is the kind of success that all web builders believe can be achieved and it’s great to see someone who has recently achieved this success.
Second, it’s a great interview because Casey talks about the tools he used to build the site and infrastructure. It’s a Ruby site (go figure) and it seems like a reasonably involved stack. Casey is very forth coming on how he built and manages the site. His stack includes:
nginx => haproxy => (load balancing) => apache + mod_passanger
Casey uses Hosted Solutions and Cogent which he says is dirt cheap. He uses Amazon S3 and MySQL 5.0 Percona build. He has 7 servers “running Gentoo Linux and virtualized into a total of 13 virtual servers with Xen.” He uses Passenger it appears to handle the Ruby site deployments, which he says happen almost daily. He also uses memcached (I have to try this one day) and something he calls Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant for caching larger objects.
Casey mentions that almost all his scaling/tuning/performance work is database related. This was interesting to me as I spend some time tuning my code, but I’m beginning to think I need to change my focus.
Bottom line is this is a great article that tells about a great site and gives some real insight into how a small web based business can be built today. Make sure you check out the link that includes a great pod cast with Casey and his co-founder Jessica (his wife) as they talk about the site. Also, my thanks to the article author Tim Bray for posting great content on his blog ongoing. Be sure to stop by and check him out.
I am actually a user of Ravelry (I knit when I am not coding hehe), and right off the bat I suspected it was a rails site. I emailed the “support” and they told me it was and gave me the blog url. Its great to see how the site runs!
Nola, thanks for stopping by and thanks for the comment!