Scott Sauyet wrote:

The link to TextDrive from the Ruby on Rails site says that

TextDrive is the official Ruby on Rails host and offers fantastic and cheap plans where 50% of the proceeds go to Rails development.

(emphasis mine) Is this true? I can find all sorts of things about the philosophy of TxD but not the structure of the organization behind it or where the profits go. I'm considering TextDrive for a new site I'm going to build, and would love to hear that it's going to pay salaries to some of those people whose open source tools I've been using for years. Not that a negative answer would stop me from considering TxD, but a positive one would be a great plus.

Is this documented somewhere on the TextDrive site?

Thanks,

-- Scott

when you sign up, you can pick a project to donate said money to. it's not 50% of the $12/$25/$40 ... i imagine it's far less like the actual profits say... $12 plan generates $2 profit... $1 to txd, $1 to developer.

the ones i see supported thus far are:
punbb
bbpress
epilog (not sure why this is here since it's a dead project)
instiki
photostack
rubyonrails
textmate (not sure why here either since it's a pay for app)
textpattern
wordpress

i'm sure one of the txd crew will chime in with more details but i think that's kinda how it works

Scott Sauyet wrote:

UnLogikal wrote:

when you sign up, you can pick a project to donate said money to. it's not 50% of the $12/$25/$40 ... i imagine it's far less like the actual profits say... $12 plan generates $2 profit... $1 to txd, $1 to developer.

[ ... ]
i'm sure one of the txd crew will chime in with more details but i think that's kinda how it works

Thanks, that makes sense. I doubt it's anything like enough for these folks to live on, but it would be nice to support them this way.

-- Scott

exactly. while i was on the monthly payment thing i had mine going to Ruby On Rails. Feels good to give back.

I agree. I doubt if the TextDrive folks are making living either. My speculation is TxD is marginally profitable, but all the money would go to maintenance and new hardware.

of course, i have no inside knowledge so this is complete speculation and i am likely wrong about almost everything :)

Is there some history posted somwhere on how this all started? Would be an interesting read...

http://textdrive.org/about/history

reid wrote:

jason wrote:

textdrive.org/about/history

401 - Unauthorized

And now it's working, but pointing to the same page as the main about page.

What jason was trying to say is, there's something coming soon

ooops

I can even imagine a book someday on the history of textdrive and textpattern, something like textdriven, a name which Dean has already registered.

The donation to a project played a significant role in my deciding to upgrade to the VCIII plan.

rainbowsheep wrote:

jason wrote:

ooops

Still 401 not authorized...

It's supposed to be that way ;)

Just wait and see.

daily.

check.

you got it.

mrmachine wrote:

i already know what it is. the textdrive link in the banner on the support page is gonna link back to the textdrive home page, like that other dude requested. no biggie.

Dang. Who told you?

Born out of a desire to run the best possible servers for those who publish on the web, TextDrive is a webhosting company with a focus on quality: performance, security and 100% availability. We also live and breathe Apache, lighttpd, PHP, Ruby, Python and MySQL.

We include ourselves among those who have in the past bought services from faceless, volume-driven webhosting companies only to become discouraged – and frequently unable to publish – as a result of the inevitable lower-common-denominator level of service found by such companies in the rush to the bottom line.

[- Prompted by bidwell being down AGAIN and tediously fscking forever while your customers wait -]

Maybe some of the proceeds could be used toward a reliable infrastructure instead of being put "back into tools" for 6 months. You've become, in my eyes, the beast you allude to in your own "About" page.

I emailed the staff privately 3 weeks ago or so in order to address the clear history of outages I've experienced. I mentioned, for one, the use of a journaling filesystem: something so fundamental to the notion of server availability that it was laughable to me in mentioning. I got zero information back (of worth) indicating the specifics of the problems you're facing, what your plan is for addressing them as a hosting company, nor any reasoning about the journaling filesystem comment. I also mentioned the Urchin licensing debacle, which was explained to me briefly. I pointed out the current situation: Customers who paid for stats. Customers who lost their stats capability. Customers being told, "Go build AWStats. We'll ALLOW YOU"

I composed the message as politely as possible and made it private out of courtesy for a first major contact about these issues.

Whether you care or not (I doubt you do based on the response I got to my letter), I am forced by your hand to seek hosting elsewhere when, somehow... I am able to even find the time to deal with it. A simple explanation of the problems, mistakes, and proposed solutions being worked on would have satiated me. Frankly, as a user of the tools you associate the company with, I've come to consider the service I've had over the last 3 months to be embarassing by association.

I'm not quite sure who you used as a hosting company before you started this one, but I've a nice handful of friends not experiencing this crap.

If you know me from the last few years (which none of you do), you know that for me to post something like this, I've really had it.

Do you have ANY RESPONSE? Any DEFENSE at ALL worth sharing that you opted out of via email?

re urchin, iirc, when i signed up, it was like this: you get a license for one domain when you sign up, and extra licences cost $10, so i guess if anyone got urchin for an extra domain, they paid the license, not a setup fee.

not that i care, though.

UnLogikal wrote:

FreeBSD (the servers run this) does not HAVE a journaled filesystem available. so, not technically possible at this point.

Then that's a real poor choice of an OS for this role then. Awful poor. Someone didn't do their homework, or didn't care.

to combat this problem they are moving the storage to a SAN setup. this means when the server goes down, the hard drives don't, as such no fsck required, just a server reboot and checks on what caused it.

Perhaps you've oversimplified their plans by saying they are going to a "SAN setup" when you meant something much more than that. A SAN has nothing to do with filesystem integrity at crash time. A "SAN" is a network of storage devices. Without additional software, a SAN is accessed by the OS exactly as it would be with a drive slapped in the server itself. I've built SANs. I've wrangled Solaris and Linux for 13 years now. You'll have to trust me.

Stats, you never paid for them. you paid for a setup fee if you had urchin before, simply a setup fee. they were $10/domain to setup. i have the email that says so. urchin is no longer responding to new clients... so what are they supposed to do? steal urchin so you can have your stats? or is it magically going to show up one day? i helped start the anemone project so people like you COULD HAVE STATS again. it'll be ready when it's ready as they've said.

Tell ya what. I'd like my "Setup fee" refunded then.

Arthur wrote:

UnLogikal wrote:

FreeBSD (the servers run this) does not HAVE a journaled filesystem available. so, not technically possible at this point.

to combat this problem they are moving the storage to a SAN setup. this means when the server goes down, the hard drives don't, as such no fsck required, just a server reboot and checks on what caused it.

What exactly is a "SAN setup" and how will it eliminate the need to do fsck when something crashes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAN

lots of good info there. SAN = Storage Area Network

here they are in the box

Last edited by UnLogikal (Today 17:11:35)

jblaine wrote:

UnLogikal wrote:

FreeBSD (the servers run this) does not HAVE a journaled filesystem available. so, not technically possible at this point.

Then that's a real poor choice of an OS for this role then. Awful poor. Someone didn't do their homework, or didn't care.

to combat this problem they are moving the storage to a SAN setup. this means when the server goes down, the hard drives don't, as such no fsck required, just a server reboot and checks on what caused it.

Perhaps you've oversimplified their plans by saying they are going to a "SAN setup" when you meant something much more than that. A SAN has nothing to do with filesystem integrity at crash time. A "SAN" is a network of storage devices. Without additional software, a SAN is accessed by the OS exactly as it would be with a drive slapped in the server itself. I've built SANs. I've wrangled Solaris and Linux for 13 years now. You'll have to trust me.

Stats, you never paid for them. you paid for a setup fee if you had urchin before, simply a setup fee. they were $10/domain to setup. i have the email that says so. urchin is no longer responding to new clients... so what are they supposed to do? steal urchin so you can have your stats? or is it magically going to show up one day? i helped start the anemone project so people like you COULD HAVE STATS again. it'll be ready when it's ready as they've said.

Tell ya what. I'd like my "Setup fee" refunded then.

FreeBSD is a better choice than Linux for example. It's the sum of all parts, not the sum of 1 part. You have any variety of distributions of linux. there's really only 1 viable freebsd solution. It has it's own way of integrity, it's called Soft Updates check that link.

as far as the san is concerned, it's beyond my realm of intense knowledge. but whatever you say. it's a solution to a problem. and i trust the guys at txd.

as for urchin. i've said all i can say about it in this thread really. i'm simply trying to give you some answers that you asked for. are they official? nope, but i figure you might appreciate it regardless. but maybe i was wrong, but feel free to bite my head off if you'd like, you won't be hurting my feelings any.

ngungo wrote:

jblaine wrote:

I've wrangled Solaris and Linux for 13 years now. You'll have to trust me.

I believe that you are capable and clever, I wonder why you chose TxD, especially you were really pissed off as you sounded.

Because, believe it or not, I wanted to support Ruby on Rails, Textpattern, Wordpress, etc.

Do you think I would have chose TxD if I was this pissed off to begin with? They did fine for the first 5 months or so.

jason wrote:

FreeBSD is a fine choice, and one that many make. That said, for what we call "shared hosting", we are moving to solaris and suse linux.

I'd love to hear more about this.