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We have been rapidly developing features for Kinnection for the past couple of months. Now that we have deployed and have a handful of users, we started to discuss how often we should update the livesite with our new features. While it’s great to get features and bug fixes out as quickly as possible, if you deploy too often your users may notice some instability in your product. But since it is so easy to deploy and rollback RoR applications with Capistrano and all our users are related to me, we decided to deploy every time we have a big chunk of functionality ready which typically works out to every week. This frequency seems to strike the right balance of getting enough new functionality in the hands of our users and stabilizing the code base.
Well we did it; http://www.kinnection.com is finally live. The guys at Rails Machine were great answering all of our newbie questions. I know it’s just an alpha but I am thrilled that the site is up so we can start getting some feedback from real live customers.
Last week we decided that we were ready to host the first version of Kinnection for our family to start using. I was talking to another entrepreneur in Seattle recently, who told me that if you aren’t embarassed by your first version then you waited too long to release. The goal of course is to get feedback from real customers as early as possible. Well I have to say that once Kinnection goes live my cheeks will be burning. The site is really rough in spots and hasn’t gotten nearly enough testing but sometimes you just have to take the plunge.
Mike looked at several options for hosting before deciding on Rails Machine. There was no question that we were going to host somewhere rather than do it ourselves. Neither of us has this experience and we felt that our time would be better served building the product instead of learning all the necessary skills to administrate Linux and make Rails work in production. Mike convinced me that we really needed to go with a hosting provider that specializes in Ruby on Rails. This narrowed the field somewhat but there were still a bunch of providers out there. The next big question was whether we wanted to go with a shared hosting solution or not. While it is way cheaper, the sense that I got from talking to several Rails developers in Seattle was that it is a bit like the “Wild Wild West” with a lot of people doing things that should never be done on a shared server resulting in downtime for everyone else who happens to be hosted on the same box. I decided this wasn’t the right approach for me. Instead I went with the virtual private server approach. It costs a good deal more but I believe that hosting is a critical part of any Web application and you shouldn’t try to cut corners on critical aspects of your business. Anyway, I got a lot of positive reviews on Rails Machines so we went with them. Mike is setting up our rails machine now and we should start deploying this week.
