Shafted by FastHosts

August 4th, 2008

As most people will know, as well as my full time job at Engine Yard I am a co-founder of Litmus along with Paul and Matt.

We re-launched our previous product SiteVista as Litmus pretty much a year ago in August 2007, anniversaries are normally such a happy affair but in our case it has become anything but. As a small self-funded start up company running a service that is very hardware intensive we had to make some careful decisions – sure we’d love to have kicked off hosting with our own custom built cluster with the best hosting company in the business but it just wasn’t possible if we wanted to retain total ownership of the company.

Paul and Matt had both hosted applications with Fasthosts before, they had some of the best value servers at the time and meant we were able to get the servers we needed with the budget that we had. Just to be sure here, at no point have we scrimped on budget with Litmus or tried to just get the cheapest servers we can find. The service requires nearly 10 physical servers to run, all need to be a reasonable spec as nearly all of them have to run Windows operating systems and keep the UI very responsive. As you can imagine this is a fairly big financial burden for a start-up to bare, I’m very proud that we’ve managed this so well and coped with the massive increase in capacity as we’ve grown – this is a testament to Matt and his ace .net coding.

Read the rest of this entry 5 comments »