Journal of a new business start up

From Markwaldin's Blog : http://soulofanewbusiness.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/more-on-technology-infrastructureseveral-topics/


I think I am a technologist at heart.  On the other hand in today’s world technology and automation are what let you scale and manage your business.  Best to put it in early rather than let your business get out of control.  So here is my latest up date.

First of all Thinkfree was an extremely smart decision to use.  It blows away Yahoo Groups and all the others.  Now my partner and I can maintain a shared file system seamlessly and it fixes my project management problem.  Unfortunately I have to use Excel as the project manager but that is better than the alternatives (like Daptiv, LiquidPlanner, etc).  The reason is that Thinkfree let’s me keep mirror copies on my desktop and on the server and let’s me synchronize them seamlessly.  I can work online or offline.  And the best part is it is very fast.  Excel runs in real time without the speed bumps of SaaS based solutions.  It is beautiful.  YOU need to use it.

Second thing is I signed up for Amazon EC2 yesterday.  EC2 is Amazon’s cloud computing service.  I can get a virtual server that is highly scalable without installing my own hardware.  Right now Inside Edge is hosted on my dedicated server in a colo center along with my other business Flycatcher.  I want to separate the businesses financially; I don’t want one business bringing down the other; and I want to bring up SugarCRM for Inside Edge and I don’t want to put that on Flycatcher.

I spent 4 hours trying to get a server instance running on EC2.  The instructions are terrible.  It is all command line driven with no GUI interface.  And when things don’t work you are left high and dry.  The system has little real time feedback or messaging and  Amazon offers no email or live person support.  So when I got to the point of using SSH to connect to their servers and all I got back was connection refused, I was stuck.  Amazon forums were of little help.

Today I took a look at GoGrid.  These guys look like they are actually in the business of supporting commercial users of the service.  They have a GUI interface, static IP, load balancing and best of all 24/7 live support.  I can get started for about $99 per month and scale from there.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

You would..
Benedict : ThinkFree Evangelist
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