Rails Industry Updates for January 2009

Webbynode is a VPS hosting service currently in the startup phase made up of a group of Rails developers based out of Miami, Austria and Brazil (and they provide support in English, Spanish, German, Russian and Portuguese!!). They offer a service focused at developers community, rather than just "plain ol' hosting". One of their novel concepts is "ReadyStacks" (tm) - ready-to-deploy environments in a few clicks. Currently stacks for Rails, Django and general LAMP are available, but community-built stacks will be available too (as well as those of your own creation).

The service is currently in beta because Webbynode wants to improve its service before launching by listening to a large group of testers. The advantage of testing the service during the beta period is that you can use the service free right now and once the service is out of beta, you will get discount over the regular price (they also mention that some could even get lifetime memberships). Interested? You can sign up for the beta here. You can also follow Webbynode on Twitter (@webbynode) or follow @cartab (Carlos Taborda - the founder).

In the last few months, New Relic - a provider of Rails app performance management services - has been in touch with me with one story or another. We usually run cold on random "enterprise" type news here, but as one of the best funded companies in the Rails world, it's finally a good time to catch up on some of what New Relic has been doing. Their health is indicative of the Rails services industry as a whole. If you are unfamiliar with New Relic, check out their free RPM Lite service - it helps you see the performance profile of your Rails apps (we use it on RubyFlow - it works well).

Back in November 2008, New Relic launched the New Relic Affiliate Program. Launch partners included Atlantic Dominion Solutions, Railsware, Relevance, and the Utah Ruby Users Group. Affiliates are paid a portion of the subscription fees from those who become subscribers. The affiliate can retain the fee or rebate it to their customer. Affiliates will be able to provide free 30-day subscriptions of RPM Gold to their customers during their customer engagements to ease the optimization of the customers' Rails applications. Affiliates can also use RPM Gold for use on their own internal applications. Today, New Relic has added Elevated Rails, HashRocket, Jackson Laycock, Juice10, MWorks, Pivotal Labs, and Progressive Data Solutions and individuals Peter Booth and Sean Hussey to their number.

Also, in addition to the $3.5 million investment Ruby Inside mentioned in May 2008, in November 2008 New Relic added another $6 million to their pile'o'cash - these guys are going to be around a while!

Brightbox is a UK based Rails hosting company. This week John Leach (joint head honcho) announced the release of a new Ubuntu package for Passenger and Apache - yes, you can be deploying Rails apps on your own Ubuntu boxes in minutes with this baby.

Brightbox also announced the start of a 50% sale - running till the end of January. It's an excellent deal - particularly in the annual variety - for Europe based Rails hosting. All their plans come with access to a managed MySQL cluster and are carbon neutral.

ENTP is officially a consultancy and Web incubator collective based in Portland - though to this point they have specialized in developing Rails apps. They're well known for the luminaries they have on their team - including Giles Bowkett and Jeremy McAnally.

Today ENTP has released Tender Support - a rather good looking customer support application. Check it out.