GoGrid Blog

WordPress is the most popular blogging content management system software in use today with over 4 million downloads in its existence. It can be seen on hundreds of thousands of websites, most notably on Ebay.com, CNN.com, People.com and the NewYorkTimes.com. Millions of readers view WordPress -based websites every day and get near real-time RSS feeds from their favorite authors. Blogging is a great way to promote your company (hence your visit here), review your current obsessions or talk about your hobbies in a community-oriented fashion.

That being said, this article will show you how to do a quick WordPress installation in less than 10 minutes on GoGrid. You will be up and running, ready to post content about what you ate for lunch or the newest tech gadget you saw on the streets, all with the clean aesthetics and easy, feature-rich navigation of a WordPress website.

To start, simply deploy a GoGrid server through the http://my.gogrid.com customer portal. In this example, we’ll use a CentOS 4.5-based LAMP stack since it has all the software packages needed for a WordPress installation already installed.

1. Click on the “+” button once you’ve logged in, then select “Web/App Server”. Enter a friendly name for your server, such as “WordPress” or the domain name you’ll use once your server is configured. Enter a quick description of the server and select an IP address (our new IP suggest function will suggest one automatically for you).
2. Next, select the operating system to run your WordPress installation on. WordPress can run on either Windows or Linux machines, but in this example we’ll use a Linux-based CentOS 4.5 server image.
3. Select the amount of RAM dedicated to your server. Depending on the amount of traffic you’re expecting, you may want to allocate a good amount of RAM to your server. I’m choosing to go with a 2GB server.
4. Select the server image you want to deploy. In this case, I’ll be using a LAMP stack. (For Windows servers, you may want to select a Windows 2003-based operating systems with IIS and MSSQL Express installed on the server image.)
5. Click on “Save” and your server will be deployed within a matter of minutes.
6. Once your server’s light turns green, click on the new WordPress server and then select the “Passwords” button at the left. This will take you to the login information for your server.

Now that a server has been deployed, you can go ahead and connect to it remotely via SSH. If you work on a Windows machine, you can download the PuTTY client to connect to a Linux Server. If you’re on a Mac or a Linux machine, you can open your terminal and SSH directly to the IP address of the new GoGrid server.

1. SSH to the new server and log in using the username and password credentials located on the “Passwords” page in the GoGrid portal. In my examples, I will use the IP address 208.113.93.243. Replace this IP address throughout this document with the IP of the server you just deployed:

   ssh 208.113.93.243

   Enter your username and password to log in.

2. Navigate to the folder where you want the WordPress installation to live. In a Linux server, this is usually in /var/www/html.

   cd /var/www/html

3. Now you need to download the WordPress package from wordpress.org:

   wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

4. Once the package has finished installing, you’ll need to unzip it:

   tar –xzf latest.tar.gz

5. A new directory called “WordPress” should appear when you enter the command “ls” to show the contents of your current directory. Now we’ll need to create the MySQL database associated with WordPress. Enter the MySQL prompt and create a new database and user for the WordPress installation. Note that you should create more securely named username, password and databases than I have below. These are just examples:

   mysql -u wordpressadmin -p

   Enter password:

   Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.

   Your MySQL connection id is 21

   Server version: 5.0.58 Source distribution

   Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

   mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;

   Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

   mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO "wordpressadmin"@"localhost"

    -> IDENTIFIED BY "abcd1234";

   Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

   mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

   Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

   mysql> EXIT

   Bye

6. In the wordpress directory, change the name of the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php:

   mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

7. Open the wp-config.php file in a text editor and enter your database details. I’ll be using vi for this, but you may use something different:

   vi wp-config.php

   Under the ** MySQL settings ** section, enter in the appropriate information regarding your database that you just created. Again, these are examples taken from the steps above:

   // ** MySQL settings ** //

   define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress'); // The name of the database

   define('DB_USER', 'wordpressadmin'); // Your MySQL username

   define('DB_PASSWORD', 'abcd1234'); // ...and password

   define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value

   define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

   define('DB_COLLATE', '');

8. Move all of the WordPress files into the desired location on the server. Currently, they are one level below the root domain directory, so we’ll have to move all of the files up one level. If you wish to keep them where they are, you will have to access your WordPress installation via the web at your IP address/ wordpress, i.e. 208.113.93.243/wordpress. You can move the files to wherever you see fit dependent on where you want them to appear on your website. In this example, the WordPress files will be moved to the root domain directory, /var/www/html:

   cd ..

   mv wordpress/* /var/www/html

9. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing the file wp-admin/install.php in a web browser. This will be the IP address/wp-admin/install.php or your hostname/wp-admin/install.php. If you installed WordPress in the root directory as I did above, go to http://208.113.93.243/wp-admin/install.php, but replace my IP address with yours. If you installed WordPress in a sub-directory, go that URL in your browser. You should see the following login prompt page:

Once your WordPress installation is configured properly, you can join the ranks of the thousands of bloggers out there in the blogosphere. Remember to set up your RSS feeds so that people can get notified when you update your site. The only problem you should have now is deciding what to post. What is going to make your blog stand out in the crowd? Hmm, sounds like a good topic for a blog entry…

The dust is still settling from Structure08 put on by GigaOM but the general vibe is that it was a solid event. With well over 600 people in attendance, Structure08 lived up to its promise of delivering timely information to businesses on how they could plan their future computing infrastructure needs.

Here’s a quick round up of GoGrid at Structure08.

GoGrid in Webware

Rafe Needleman, editor for Webware.com,  spoke at length with GoGrid CEO, John Keagy, and within hours posted the results of his interview this article titled “Tiny (comparatively) GoGrid takes on Amazon Web Services“. Rafe actually summarized GoGrid as compared to Amazon’s EC2 into something that could even be written multiple time in a single Twitter message (within the 140 character limit): “The GoGrid pitch: We’re cheaper. And easier.”

Rafe writes:

“I can’t do a hands-on with these two cloud services, but there are a few other points that I found interesting. First, GoGrid offers virtual Windows services, as well as Linux, and about 50 percent of its installations are for Windows processes. Some popular Web 2.0 services, like CommunityServer, are still Windows-only.

Also, GoGrid has never had a system-wide outage, as Amazon has. Keagy is realistic, though: “We’re in beta. It will happen to us too.” But, he says, with well-designed systems, recovery can be swift.”

Be sure to give Rafe’s article a read.

John Keagy Structure08 Interview

Our CEO John spent a few minute in front of the camera discussing what was important about Structure08 and how GoGrid fit perfectly into the mix.

This video and others from Structure08 are also available at the Mogulus Structure08 channel.

Photos from Structure08

More photos from this event can be found on the ServePath Flickr account.

Following Structure08 on Twitter (via Hashtags)

For those interested in reading the “real-time” stream coming from people who use Twitter and flag their Tweets with Hashtags, you can see the Structure08 Hashtag stream here. (Follow me on Twitter here.)

This insightful post on the RightScale blog recently got me thinking. The term “Cloud Computing” is much too vague. People want and need “slots” or “segments” where they can group things. This is how the mind operates through categorization and ordering. So, to possibly help with this, I would like to propose a “Cloud Pyramid” to help differentiate the various Cloud offerings out there.

There are other ways to display this hierarchy, however I elected to show it as a pyramid. For example, if one were to weight the graphic by the number of providers within each segment, the pyramid would be upside-down. The point here though is to show how these cloud segments build upon and are somewhat dependent upon each other. While they are directly related, they don’t require interdependence (e.g., a Cloud Application does not necessarily have to be built upon a Cloud Platform or Cloud Infrastructure). I would propose, however, that Cloud trends indicate that they will become more entwined over time.

Cloud Application

Within this part of the pyramid, users are truly restricted to only what the application is and can do. Some of the notable companies here are the public email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Quicken Online, etc.). Almost any Software as a Service (SaaS) provider can be lumped into this group. Most retail consumers use the services within this Cloud. You get pre-defined functionality and you cannot much further than that. Applications are designed for ease of use and GTD (getting things done). SalesForce, a huge Cloud Application/SaaS provider that has led the way for hosted software, falls into this category as well, however, their force.com product does not. Even online banking offerings could be lumped into this group.

Characteristics:

• Strengths
  • Sometimes free; easy to use; lots of different offerings; easy to access; good consumer adoption; proven business models
• Weaknesses
  • You can only use the application as far as what it is designed for; no control or knowledge of underlying technology

Cloud Platforms

As you move further down the pyramid, you gain increased flexibility and control but your a still fairly restricted to what you can and cannot do. Within this Category things get more complicated to achieve. Products and companies like Google App Engine, Heroku, Mosso, Engine Yard, Joyent or force.com (SalesForce platform) fall into this segment. This category is becoming more congested with competitors, many of whom are trying to leverage the Cloud Infrastructure.

Characteristics:

• Strengths
  • Great for developers with a particular niche target, upload a tightly configured applications and it simply “runs”; more control than a Cloud Application
• Weaknesses
  • Restricted to the platform’s ability only; hard to work “outside the box”; sometimes dependant on Cloud Infrastructure providers

Cloud Infrastructure

At the bottom of the pyramid are the infrastructure providers like Amazon’s EC2, GoGrid, RightScale and Linode. Companies providing infrastructure enable Cloud Platforms and Cloud Applications. Most companies within this segment operate their own infrastructure, allowing them to provide more features, services and control than others within the pyramid. And at this foundation level, GoGrid offers infrastructure in the form of both Linux and Windows, load-balancing, and storage. Some Infrastructure providers may leverage others within the space in order to provide competitive viability as well.

Characteristics:

• Strengths
  • Offers full control of server infrastructure; not confined to “containers” or “applications” or restrictive instances
• Weaknesses
  • Sometimes comes with a price premium; infrastructure offerings still being built out

This post is open to discussion! My questions, what do YOU consider to be good examples of each Cloud Category? Can Cloud Computing be broken down into the ones listed above? What segment has been omitted and why do you think it is that way?

Lastly, for a humorous analysis of all of this, take a look a John M Willis’ post “Is Everyone an aaS?” which, in a tongue-in-cheek way, puts it all into perspective.

Today, InfoWorld’s Tech Writer, Bill Snyder, brought GoGrid solidly into the race with Amazon’s EC2 with his article titled “Red Hat the latest proof that cloud computing is serious business.” Snyder, who has been following technology and the business of technology for 25 years, discusses GoGrid’s “point-and-click infrastructure” and its ease of use in this article.

While Bill mentions that cloud computing may not be ready for large-scale business or the enterprise, he does point out that it is a force to be reckoned with and that the services of GoGrid and Amazon’s EC now “will give a lot of users a chance to take cloud computing for a low-risk, real-world test drive.” I personally predict that the adoption of cloud computing and cloud infrastructure by the enterprise will be a slow uptake at first, most likely rolling out into skunkwork divisions, short-term projects or IT evaluation scenarios, but that within a few years, business not seriously considering “the cloud” will be behind in their technical and competitive advantages.

Snyder highlights a real-world GoGrid success (that I covered here) about how ScribbleLive was able to handle multiple million page view requests in a short amount of time during the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference. He emphasized the importance of easy and quick scalability coupled with cost-effectiveness provided by GoGrid:

“ScribbleLive, a two-person operation, quickly scaled up using GoGrid, and was able to keep running with little or no loss of throughput. The price: $15 for a day of server time, plus bandwidth charges. Hmm. Maybe the folks at Mozilla, who tried to set a world’s record for downloads of the new Firefox browser but wound up crashing their site, could have done something similar.”

Simplicity is another key factor that Snyder outlines in his review, stating:

“In theory, at least, setting up servers on GoGrid seems almost too easy. Once a client signs up for the service, an IT staffer can point a browser to GoGrid’s site and choose a configuration from a variety of pull down menus. GoGrid supports Windows Server 2003, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

His article also comments on pricing, the GoGrid infrastructure and plans for the future. Definitely give Snyder’s article a read as it successfully boils GoGrid down to a few nicely-crafted paragraphs of analysis.

As GoGrid continues its record breaking sign-ups, we get asked repeatedly how we compare against Amazon’s EC2. While not exactly an apples to apples comparison, there are enough similarities to warrant a few matrices to illustrate the differences.

Feature Comparison Matrix

Server/Instance Price Comparison

* Pricing is based on the Advanced Grid service plan.

Load-Balance Server Network Price Comparison***

*** Pricing is based on the Advanced Grid service plan

Data Transfer Price Comparison

** Pricing is based on the Transfer 200 GB service plan.

While not officially sanctioned by our Product Management team, I added this for good measure.

Deployment Time Comparison

**** A bit of humor after watching a long video showing how to deploy EC2 images.

If there is another GoGrid comparison that you would like to see, just leave a comment and we will do our best to post in the future.

Clouds are sexy right now. In this article, I tracked how “Cloud Computing” is becoming a hot, up and coming Google Search term. But why is it that there are so many new user communities that are conglomerating around “the cloud” versus other more traditional hosting concepts. I would say because of the social environment where this technology is emerging.

Asking the Question

Where does one learn about technology trends? How does one test it out or know if it is a match for your offering?

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Traditional Hosting in the 90’s

The early 90’s were marked with the presence of AOL being the primary way that users got on the World Wide Web (now just called the Internet because people are using far more than just HTTP for content delivery). AOL brought a new sense of community and an easy way to “get online.” As AOL tried to continue its monolithic domination of online access, other companies started popping up offering alternatives to advertising-heavy AOL within metropolitan markets. Companies like Netcom, CompuServe and AT&T became notable AOL dial-up competitors.

As dial-up companies became more mainstream, they had to compete against the daily CD-ROM mailers congesting the traditional direct marketing channels. Advertising and PR among traditional hosting providers ranged from print ads to directory listing services like Yahoo!. Also, dial-up service was the main method of getting on the WWW. When people wanted to find dial-up providers, one’s choices were pretty limited, either go with a large “closed” community like AOL or national or local dial-up provider. As dial-ups expanded, the ISPs began to offer hosting packages as well. As hosting slowly became more mainstream and competition started heating up, perspective clients had to hunt around to find reviews or opinions of these providers, frequently leaving more confused than not. In the end, word-of-mouth played a huge part in the final decision as well as simple bulletin boards were the place where a majority of end users did their research. Communities were there but frequently closed or hard to find.

“In-between” Hosting of Dot-Com

Step forward to the end of the 1990’s and we saw an even more cluttered landscape. Traditional hosting provides still existed. Managed hosting was becoming mainstream and the Dot-com era was upon us. Suddenly, anyone could make a “business” on the web and have vast quantities of money thrown at them, even without having a solid business plan. Companies, like WebVan, spent huge amounts of money on portions of their business that really had little impact to their bottom line. Actually, the Sub-Zero refrigerators and $800 Herman Miller chairs that were purchased eventually helped to de-value the company rather than help it in any way. Dot-coms were all about making as big of a splash as possible, gaining brand visibility at all costs possible, and not looking back to check spending.

Nobody seemed to care about IT spending. It just happened along with the IPOs and Venture Capitalist dolling money out like it was going out of style. It was very hard for a company to rise above the fold without these capital expenditures. Companies planned on becoming the next big thing and invested heavily in data centers and computer infrastructure. Hosting providers simply rode the wave. The people talking during this time were the CEO’s, Executives, Investment Bankers and Venture Capitalists; all the rest (of us) just held on tight to our thousands of stock-options, hoping that we would be the next multi-millionaire on the block, and worked 15 hour days without coming up for air. The decisions were made by those with the money.

Then it all burst.

Web 2.0 and “Evolved” Hosting

As the shrapnel fell from the Dot-Com bomb, companies were forced to re-group, re-engineer and re-architect. Everybody knew that the Internet was here to stay as a viable marketing channel, but also as a business marketplace. Companies who survived the bust, continued to limp along while others sat back to watch what would happen. Then began Web 2.0, emerging from the ruins as a completely different beast. Gone were the days of money being thrown around haphazardly and business decisions made on a whim. Companies now had to be self-funded, with a proven business model and an established user base.

The commonality during this and previous times was that all business needed places to host their products. What had changed were the ways to host and the cost associated with hosting. Traditional hosting providers continued to cut their costs while adding more and more services. 1and1.com, for example, entered the US market in 2003. They broke into the US market softly and then started taking out huge, multi-paged spreads in traditional, even main-stream, print publications. This is just one example of how hosting was becoming even more mainstream and less reserved for the technologist.

This sudden influx of cheap and available hosting helped to foster the emergence of new Web 2.0 companies and services. But as technology continued to better itself exponentially, hosting alternatives to the traditional  began to be more prevalent. Virtualization was an important catalyst to this, allowing servers to be used differently, more efficiently and more broadly. Hosting providers started carving out services with Virtual Private Servers (VPS’s) as well as offering a full gamut of dedicated servers at increasingly competitive rates.

Web 2.0 companies now had a choice: traditional, dedicated, shared and in-house hosting, each offering advantages and disadvantages. But that wasn’t enough.

Social Media and the Cloud Community

So why is “Cloud Computing” suddenly so hot? I would say that it is not due to the technology alone, but rather because of the new super-social community driving it. The people making Web 2.0 what it is today are connected in so many different ways than before. Communication has evolved from bulletin boards to instant communities and relationships through services like Twitter, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, Facebook and podcasts, to name just a few. Couple these social communication tools with online publications like TechCrunch or Mashable who cover emerging companies and trends, and communities start flooding the market. These communities aren’t just connected, they are talking with fervor and passion. Creating a community takes a fraction of the amount of time than in the past. Look at the Cloud Computing Google Group, for example. This group did not have any messages or members back in March 2008, as of mid-June, there are over 1000 members and the group discussions are growing exponentially. People simply want to talk about these new technologies and understand how they can provide a competitive advantage to their own business.

Communities are driving the clouds. Web 2.0ers talk at meetups, on Twitter, at conferences and directly among each other. They are looking for the best technological match for their offerings and the best price to do so. To touch on the price issue, this is a paradigm shift from the Dot-com era of free spending. Startups are bootstrapped and given the state of the “recessive” economy, so are larger companies and enterprises. So as the features of cloud computing are attracting technologists and developers, the pay-as-you-go or utility pricing models are attracting CFO’s and budget-minded IT managers.

So why the heavy adoption of products like Cloud Hosting products like GoGrid or Amazon’s EC2 within the Web 2.0 community? It’s because of social media professing the advantages, the new pricing models and possible uses of this technology. Any Web 2.0 company that I talk to I ask the question, “what are you built on?” This is a pretty open-ended question which could be answered by the software powering a service or the technology behind it. Traditional hosting is not sexy, Cloud Computing and Hosting is. If a Web 2.0er is using the newest technology to drive their business, they epitomize this new generation as well as potentially show sound technical and financial business decisions.

Keep the Cloud talks going, it’s the technology driving Web 2.0 and Social Media.

I spent some time analyzing search trends of different computing keywords to try to put everything in perspective. Google trends is a nice too that gives insight into broad search patterns.

We all know that the term “Cloud Computing” is relatively new to the Technology buzz. But just how new is it? For starters, I ran a quick comparison of “Cloud Computing,” “Grid Computing” and “Utility Computing”.

The term Grid Computing has been around for a while (even before Google Trends tracking shows it). But as you can see from the graphic above, it is trending downwards. Utility Computing has pretty much remained below the radar in comparison. But, the newcomer Cloud Computing, which made its full entrance into this trend analysis around 2007 is rapidly gaining momentum. 2008 seems to be a pivotal time where it surpassed Grid Computing (and continues to grow).

Cloud computing is relatively new as a server hosting term. People are starting to loosely associate it with traditional hosted server solutions. So to put this all in perspective as well as add some other “hot” keywords in to the mix, I trended the following:

• Cloud computing
• Grid computing
• Dedicated server
• Colocation
• Virtualization

The results were quite interesting:

My read on this is as follows:

• Cloud Computing and Virtualization are the next hot hosting platforms. It is important to keep in mind that the term “Virtualization” can apply to many things, not simply hosting, in fact, Virtualization within the hosting environment is comparable to Cloud Computing. Virtualization has existed for some time, but mainly within a host’s computer (e.g., a desktop). But as Parallels, VMWare, Xen and even Microsoft’s Hyper-V gain momentum as virtualized servers within a hosted environment, this term will continue to grow. See the chart below for further details (VMware is the clear leader but Hyper-V is clearly going to gain market-share quickly).
  
• The Dedicated server term is slowly starting to lose ground vs. Virtualization and Cloud Computing, but it is fairly obvious that it is still a term that people know and look for. There are always developers or companies who will ONLY go with a dedicated server for one reason or another. I predict, though, that as they start getting on the virtualization and cloud bandwagons, that this term will continue to erode. Another term “VPS” (Virtual Private Server) is fairly common among hosting solutions but differs from Virtualization in many ways. With a VPS, you share resources with the other clients on a particular server, whereas Virtualized servers (like GoGrid which is built on top of Xen) dedicate RAM and CPU usage to the predefined server instances running on a particular node. To again put it all into perspective, see the chart below. VPS is one of the terms that seems to be remaining steady as a searched term. This is most likely due to the fact that most of the main-stream hosting providers offer VPS hosting as their “bread & butter.”
  

In general, these terms all seem to be converging, which means only one thing, confusion and clutter within the marketplace. With so many options now available, potential server customers are presented with even more choices, and these choices frequently can’t be directly compared. One can look at RAM allocation, Hard Drive sizes and CPU speeds as sort of a rudimentary measure, but that is where the simple comparisons end. Now one is forced to choose between scalability options, server and data persistence, operating system images, peripherals (like firewalling and load-balancing), data storage, clone-ability…the list goes on. Attempts are being made to standardize these comparisons with check-lists, but since the market is so new and mutating with new entrants and updated feature sets, the IT Professional may be challenged when making decisions.

Lastly to put things all in perspective a bit, I ran a couple of other search terms, comparing “Twitter”  against Cloud, Grid and Utility Computing…the results aren’t surprising (the green line is Twitter):

And put the iPhone into the mix and everything drops off the map (note, this graph is just for Cloud, Grid, Twitter and iPhone - iPhone is the green line below):

Also, the Cloud just got another potential injection of PR from Apple as well with their announcement of MobileMe. To take directly from the source:

“MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars on a secure online server — or “cloud” — and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others.”

Apple has brought a new technology term, the “Cloud”, previously reserved for developers, IT managers and the like to the main-stream public. Watch the cloud continue to grow now almost exponentially, I predict, even down to common-place iconography:

So, how can you “keep your head out of the clouds” with all of this clutter? I can offer the following points to help:

• Look beyond the hardware - it’s becoming virtualized and virtually upgraded constantly; some companies will tout just one piece of the mix, look at Support, the company’s history, their Terms of Service or Service Level Agreements as other non-tangible measures
• Don’t just jump on the bandwagon - a solution for one company or competitor may not be the solution for you; shop carefully
• Get involved with the community - the fact that you are reading this article means that you are doing the right thing in doing your research first. Read blogs and forums as well as attend meetings to talk to end users
• Don’t over-extend your resources - IT budgets are tight so make your decision based on that. Dedicated servers are frequently premium monthly payments; virtualized hosting can even be price by usage
• Follow the K.I.S.S. rule - keep things simple; over-engineered network topologies can actually hurt your presence.

Where does GoGrid come into play? For starters, it offers “control in the cloud” by crystallizing real, on-demand servers into an experience that is simple, scaleable and powerful. If you want to visit Cloud Computing in a way that is both understandable and attainable, look no further than GoGrid.

Today the Internet was abuzz with the latest Steve Jobs’ Keynote address at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, so much so that Twitter was brought to its knees and other blogging sites were overwhelmed with repeated traffic requests. I watch the action on a variety of sources (pictures and text from Engadget and Audio being streamed through uStream). It was a bit painful having to manual refresh or have audio drop during the keynote speech, but the announcements were eventually heard world-wide.

This post is not about the iPhone though but rather about a new GoGrid customer who was recently written up on TechCrunch, ScribbleLive. ScribbleLive is an Ajax-based, Live Blogging platform that enables authors to cover live events in a real-time manner. Billed as a “media rich conference call” ScribbleLive provides audiences an immersive experience on browsers and mobile devices alike, pushing text, links, pictures and videos instantly without the need to constantly reload the browser page.

What makes this story noteworthy is that ScribbleLive is a true, bootstrapped startup. The company, founded by Jonathan Keebler and Michael De Monte, was put together for about $1500. They are only 2 employees but have set up an infrastructure of a well-established company, with GoGrid powering their Application and Database servers and Akamai providing the CDN (content delivery network).

During the WWDC event, they ran their own “System Status” LiveBlog to keep users up to date on the systems powering other users live-blogging. Some highlights:

• The day before the event they were getting 181,000+ page views
• Throughput before, during and after the event ranged between 1.3 to 4.6 Mbits/sec
• Front-end servers maintained 2% CPU utilization
• Database server peaked at 7% CPU utilization
• 1.5 hours before the event, 1+ unique visitors/sec were accessing the site

I asked Jonathan Keebler some questions about how GoGrid was used so successfully with ScribbleLive and here is what he said:

Question: How many GoGrid Servers were you using?
Answer: Two web servers and one database server all with 1GB RAM each

Q: What were the configurations of the servers?
A: All were running Windows Server 2003 and the Database Server was SQL Server 2005

Q: How was your system architecture set up?
A: Akamai took all of the traffic on the edge, using GoGrid as the “origin server”

Q: How many Live Blogs covered the event?
A: There were seven blogs running simultaneously with over 40 writers

Q: What is the anticipated cost for the event?
A: Whatever GoGrid costs for the day [author’s note: 3 - 1 GB servers running for 24 hours = approx. $15 for the day, not including SQL Server or Bandwidth charges)

From Jonathan:

“Being a startup with extremely spiky traffic around large live events, we were looking for a dedicated hosting option that could scale with us. Working with GoGrid, we were able to bring online as many servers as we needed to cover our big events. By being able to manage our own load-balancers with fault-tolerance, we were able to ensure that we maintained high availability under large traffic volume.”

Note: you can follow some of Jonathan’s GoGrid comments on his blog here and here.

Congratulations to ScribbleLive their success with WWDC as well as handling a potentially network crippling event with ease using GoGrid!

Yesterday we rolled out a new feature for GoGrid that should make the creation of Servers and Load Balancers even easier and faster. We call it “IP Suggest” and it is extremely easy to use. As you are creating a new Server or Load Balancer and you come to the IP Address field, just start typing in the beginning digits of your IP addresses. The network “widget” shows you a list of all of your Public IP addresses, used or unused.

For the Application/Web/Database servers, only the UNUSED IP addresses are presented within the IP address field.

The Load Balancer acts a bit differently. For the Virtual IP field, only the UNUSED IP addresses are displayed, however on the Real IPs field (these would be the IP addresses of the application/web/database server where you want the Load Balancer to direct traffic), ALL IP addresses are displayed.

Below is a quick Flash video that showcases the feature in action.

Hope you like this enhancement!

NetworkWorld today ran a review of GoGrid in their Web Applications Alert newsletter. Mark Gibbs, consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger, provides a candid analysis of GoGrid’s current offering in the review titled “Cloud Computing for the Middle Market.” However, it’s his sub-title provides the best summary: “With GoGrid you can provision a server in less than five minutes,” a fact that he experienced first hand.

For several months now, I have been touting the strengths of GoGrid through articles, blog responses, social networks and other media channels. Gibbs echoes many of GoGrid’s strengths (and a few weaknesses even) in his careful analysis. Some highlights:

“A new entrant in this market is GoGrid, currently in its Public Beta phase. I’ve tested the service and what GoGrid claims is true – you can provision a server in less than five minutes. A few minutes more and you can have more servers as well as load balancers and databases.”

Later Gibbs continues:

“GoGrid is very easy to expand and contract as needed and there’s a choice of operating systems to use (Windows as well as several Linux distros with different services configurations). Add to that 24/7 support and GoGrid is a very interesting platform for a variety of markets.”

It is Gibbs’ conclusion that contains the most resounding comment:

“GoGrid is somewhat ahead of the market with this service – maybe six months at present – and if it can get all its enhancements and improvements in place on the schedule it has discussed then GoGrid could become a market leader.”

I had several conversations with Mark during the review process and we heartily agreed about several things. Most importantly, there is potentially a huge market initiative for SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) and small enterprises to really take advantage of these emerging technologies like GoGrid. As cloud computing becomes much more mainstream, the solutions available within that arena become financial and technologically more viable to all sizes of companies.

IT budgets are tighter (or even barely existent) now. Gone are the requirements to have month-long contracts for servers or even have huge capital expenditures to simply “trial” your product within the marketplace. I have said this before and continue to restate it: business should spend their time working on their business applications and not worrying as much about the infrastructure driving it. Assuming these business applications are built well, let the technology experts worry about the infrastructure. GoGrid is leading the way with providing “control in the cloud” in a way that is simple from a usability standpoint yet extremely powerful from a technological perspective.