SwirrlSpeak

Swirrl is being developed on Ruby on Rails. I’ll post again later with more details about our choice of platform, but for those who don’t know: Ruby on Rails is an open source web development framework originally created by David Heinemeier Hansson (commonly referred to in the Rails community as DHH) from 37 signals, and then extended by open source contributors.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to mention our excellent web hosting company, Brightbox, who provide Xen-based Virtual Dedicated Servers, with a full Rails stack pre-installed and ready to go.

Why are they so excellent? Well, for a start, their offering is based on Xen, which DHH and 37 signals themselves approve of. Brightbox is a young company (formed less than a year ago), but the fact that they are a small and friendly company coupled with their speciality in Rails hosting, means that when I’ve contacted them for support their responses have been reassuringly swift and knowledgeable. They have also been keen to take suggestions on board, impressing us with their genuine willingness to improve.

Brightbox also make it easy to deploy to your virtual server by providing a gem with a set of Capistrano 1.4.1 recipes, which although not perfect, provide a good starting point for deployment. (We’re in the process of honing these recipes onto our own specialised deployment strategy using the more recent version 2.2). In order to make sense of these recipes and all other aspects of their service, Brightbox provide a very useful, ever growing support wiki.

The service itself has been reliable enough since we signed up, given it’s in its infancy. Their reasonable pricing and great support means I see no reason why we can’t enjoy a long and happy relationship with Brightbox.