Well, they were ok for the shared hosting. I switched to their virtual dedicated server and along with a ordering mistake on their end the server that I eventually got was horribly over used and slow. So slow that the shared hosting was better.
I’ve had success with 1and1 in the past so I ordered their dedicated server. The setup was quick and the server performs well. It’s currently running gpokr.
Where did gpokr go today? The answer is a string of unlikely events:
2006/06/20, 09:17 AM : Updating hosts for Free and Enhanced services is temporarily disabled due to a small outage. It should be available again in the next few minutes. There is no need to resubmit your updates, they will go through as soon as this is rectified.
A few minutes turned into several hours.
Its back up but the situation is so ghetto. Lets get gpokr out of the ghetto. Please recommend a good tomcat host.
There's lots of great development tools coming out and a lot of interest in building services for people. There is also the "build it and they will come" mentality everywhere.
More often than not it doesn't seem to work. Fold.com has recently closed its doors because it couldn't keep up with competion. Micheal Arrington's comment on fold.com's closing has a good point about building applications:
"Well, the inevitable is starting to happen - a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back" - Micheal Arrington
Innovation in development tools and techniques has a value ceiling. I had a discussion on Joshua Wehners blog this week about the excitement behind Ruby on Rails and why people should not be so excited. Micheal Arringtons point clarifies this again. Technology can get very good, allowing you to make better apps, but everyone is going to be making better apps. There are a lot of areas beyond the tool that you use that you could use to differentiate yourself from the competition to attract people and retain members.
I've been playing around with different techniques over the last month. On whirlpad.com, a free travel blogging service I built earlier this year, I introduced a Travel IQ test called the TQ test. It measures your travel knowledge by having you match photos of toilets from around the world to their location. With a bit of seeding this test consistently brings 1000 uniques per day. This is quite a bit more than the homepage of whirlpad.com.
The interesting thing here is that the bottleneck to creating more tests, and getting more traffic is not the technology, RoR or LAMP. They really don't matter. The important work is in the creative effort to develop the test. The travel blogging service, however, has a lot more development work than marking/PR/people-attracting work.
Being a good developer and usuing the greatest newest technology is not enough anymore. Besides, that type of work can be easily outsourced. Just because its easy for me to grow tomatoes in my backyard doesn't mean I should start a business around it.
I like hearing about new techniques when it comes to software development. I'm very open about new ways to do things and evaluate them critically. Startups, on the other hand, look for things that people are most excited about. This makes sense. It's much easier to convince VC's when there is buzz. Unfortunately, over the last year or so this buzz has been about not the the product but the technology used to build the product. Ruby on Rails is The way to write web services. Here is an interesting semi-critical article on "Reasons Why Your Startup Should Use Ruby On Rails".
I'm sure RoR is as great to use as most people say but its still just a language and framework…. just like all the other options. Another 3G language. There are no truly fundamental differences. I'm a little worried when someone thinks that it will solve all of their previous problems. It reminds me a bit of when VB came out and it was easy to write a simple windows app… and everyone thought they were a windows developer for about a year or two. In reality, once the buzz dies down RoR will at be an initial contributor of more efficient web development methodologies. That's it. And the framework/language with the most money behind it will most likely win.
Besides, its just a tool. Some linguistics research searchs for an optimal human language, which is cool, but the stuff more important than syntax and semantics is the creativity and expression in literature that an individual creates.
Web technologies are accelerating faster than I've seen before. It's hard to keep up. Last year it was Ruby that was the cool web dev tool. I'm sure its still cool but Yahoo with Yahoo UI, Microsoft with Atlas, and now Google with GWT, there are so many other ways to write web apps.
I'm looking through GWT and it seems well done. You write your web application in Java and compile it to javascript. The generated javascript is very compact and you can debug your Java code using an IDE like Eclipse. This is a huge step for javascript web apps.
There is something that doesn't seem right though and it may just be that GWT is too many steps ahead to seem like the right step right now. What about HTML and light clients… the stuff that made the web popular. You could have Java in the browser for over 10 years. Why is it better when you can compile it to javascript? Well, you look at GMail, Google Maps, Google Calendar and you see why. This stuff integrates well with HTML DOM through javascript… java didn't. Mixing HTML and window controls has been used in Windows since Win98 but now they're being mixed in the browser. But what about good old fashioned web pages that are documents with links?
They don't need to change. Not everything needs to be asynchronous. Editing things and streaming data like IM benifit, but news doesn't. There is a clear division in web content.
Over the last couple years its been all about Google with its open API's its received a lot of love from developers. Mashup were everywhere. And with its IPO and stock prices soaring google seemed unstoppable. Both Microsoft, with its live.com work, and Yahoo, with its many acquisitions, have been playing catchup.
I've just gone through the Yahoo Developer Network… its really good. Everything is open. And its not just server side API's they've released a very nice looking javascript and CSS UI library. Google has great UI's but has failed to release these to developers. Yahoo is cool again.
