Come for the Ride…

After six hours of hard work (thanks Robert), our first dedicated server is now online!

Why did I decide to name my server Leela? Well, after seeing iStat Pro’s demo naming their computers after Futurama characters, the idea to give computers personalities stuck in my head. (I’m easily impressionable.)

In a way, it’s good because it creates an internal lingo. On the other hand, this will allow our emails to be a bit more cryptic when mentioning key servers in the event we’re compromised. (Yeah, I’m totally making that up from Gone in 60 Seconds.)

But why Leela? Well, Leela is a loner; but she is also a captain that can kick butt and handle all jobs without a hiccup, so I thought it was fitting. Now we just have to wait a few more days before we can transfer everything over and take on more traffic.

This past weekend when our team met, we got into a serious discussion about upgrading our server to a dedicated machine that we would co-locate in Atlanta. While my friend at Booz Allen questioned why we would go this route when we’re not in the web hosting reseller business, we actually gave it a lot of thought and decided that this would be our cheapest, long term option.

So last weekend, for the first time in 5+ years, I went back to Dell.com and started spec’ing out high end servers. I think deep down inside, the geek in me would like to create something big enough that we can actually fill up a whole rack full of servers and say, “Look! That’s our piece of the internet” On the other hand, I know no one really cares about the hardware and our wallets really wanted to have nothing to do with my geeky dream.

But the fun part here is that co-located hosting is uncharted territory for us and this is one area I am looking forward to learning a lot about. My last venture had about 100,000 users and it certainly did not need any kind of extreme load balancing or backup solutions. However, with up to 16 million records per year for just vehicles plus other usage data we will be tracking, we basically need a kick ass machine just to handle the data load before we even worry about serving the site to any users.

This is where Dell in a coincidental moment, shined!

Not two days after us talking about the need to upgrade and actually looking at prices printed out on paper, a representative from Dell’s team contacted us and offered to invite us into their discount club. Apparently they found my YouNoodle.com post about our startup, liked what they saw and wanted to get us on the Dell train early so we can bring them along for the ride. (Apparently AutoTrader hosts with HP, so this could be a win for them if I get my rack of servers.)

Now, the marketing and timing here is purely coincidental, but we were more than happy to reaffirm our decision to shop for the dedicated server with Dell especially now that we could get the exact same server we wanted, add warranties and support AND save a few hundred dollars in the process.

Although some may say targeted advertising is scary and could potentially be like “big brother” with the amount of data it collects; I would have to say that as a consumer who knew exactly what he wanted, being able to add more discounts before I pulled the trigger really put me over the top for this vendor. If we were dilly-dallying before on our decision, this “just-in-time” coupon definitely won us over.

With that… we will definitely implement an online version of this sales technique on our web service to help dealers sell more vehicles.

Launch week has been pretty successful.  Even though we are purposely not blasting all the web 2.0 news sites with our arrival due to low inventories, we still managed to get a lot of helpful advice from our friends and mentors who have been checking out the site.  In fact, if you’re in the Atlanta area and are looking for a Panoz, we can hook you up!

With that said, much needs to be done.  We have to optimize our code, we have to create and fill in content, we have to find and squash bugs and last but not least, we really want to get at least 100,000 cars for the metro Atlanta area. (that would be 2x what AJC Cars has)

Before we get there, we need to pick up our speed - our server has been killing us.  This part of the growing pain has actually been an interesting experience for our team considering none of us have faced this problem before.  When we first started, we did what we could to save money.  This included borrowing old servers on T1 connections from our jobs and using them when the resources are available.  Alas, our network of old servers and slow connections that make up Frankenstein could not handle our daily chores.  With that, we decided we need to really invest on a new server - one that can handle the daily imports and the request of 10’s of our fans.

Well, when there’s more to report, I will let you know.  In the mean time, any suggestions on where to find servers and when to upgrade would be greatly appreciated.

As far as corporate blogs go, I would rate “customizing” a very low priority item. This is especially true since we only have a limited number of readers and EasyAutoSales.com, the main business, lacks a working beta for testing. Also in all honesty, people go to blogs for content, not their design; when was the last time you cared about how TechCrunch or TechMeMe looked?

However, since I’m not familiar with our chosen code platform and I can’t help in that department, upgrading and moving the blog was what I’ve spent the last few days on as I took some time to learn more about WordPress and everything that it offers. As of this post, our new home is now at http://comefortheride.com

Compared to Blogger, Xanga, TypePad, LiveJournal, MySpace and various other platforms, WordPress seems to be the blog platform of choice for serious bloggers who want to make money and host their own domains; cause well… personal domains = BIG time. For once, I am happy to say that I am not a first adopter and that hopping onto WordPress this late in the game had the benefit of using a number of templates, plugins and migration tools that made the customization and transition from Blogger to WordPress a piece of cake!

I remember back in 1998 when I first started blogging, I literally had to create my own platform, first from static pages and quickly thereafter via a database. Creating a look required even more work as I literally had to spend days in Photoshop working up a template and then cutting everything to work as a html document; bloggers sure have it easy these days. WordPress templates (free or paid) are everywhere… and installing them was also cake. Blogger.com unfortunately only had a number of templates available and being a visual person, it was unsatisfactory.

So with a little manipulation of the CSS file and some simple installation instructions, our new blog is now fully customized and most of what we cared about: SEO friendliness, custom look, RSS feed, transferring content, etc. were all setup without too much sweat. As I dig into other needs, I’m sure I’ll be pleasantly surprised with additional features that WordPress can offer to help. Let’s just hope I don’t go overboard with it.

On a somewhat related note, Google Analytics now offers new code on its admin console for tracking and reporting additional stats (ga.js). It’s unclear what more they will be reporting for now but if you’re a stat freak and want to test out their new features in the near future, it may be worth logging in now and grabbing the new html code to place on your site. Had I not upgraded our blog to a new domain that required new codes, I probably wouldn’t have remembered reading about this a couple of days back.

Our last chores post gained some unexpected assistance getting us into the Grand Central beta. Thanks Ginene for sending us the invites! We will think of you every time we get a call that forwards straight to the voice mail. =)

Okay… so we’re now in month 2, starting month 3 of the project. One of the things that should be easy but for our somewhat unique situation isn’t, is web hosting.

I’ve done a few ventures before where hosting was a cinch! We pick a random web host, ran with it for awhile and when the time and/or traffic came to a point where moving was necessary, we simply packed up our files and DB and moved. Having setup both on shared hosting and dedicated hosting, I really, REALLY can not recommend shared hosting. If you’re looking to code a brochure site or having a blog on your own domain, that would probably work great for you. The price is great and using admin software makes setup a breeze. However, if you are starting a serious business, it’s hard to justify all the risks that come with shared hosting.

- If someone writes inefficient code on your server, WHAM! Your service can slow to a crawl or worse, go down.

- If someone SPAMs from your server, your site/IP could potentially get blacklisted if sharing the same IP. On another note, if you don’t have your own unique IP for your mail server, chances are you can’t even send mass mail to a majority of your customers.

- If someone on your server gets the DIGG effect, you too may suffer as a result.

- If you need to install something that isn’t already provisioned on the server, depending on who you’re with you may get a yay or nay; which could severely affect your services.

Basically all of the above are things I don’t want to worry about when I should be focusing on growing the business. I’ve actually hopped about 10 hosting providers in a span of 6 months before so I do have some experience in this field.

“If you are serious about running a marathon, get the right shoes.”

So what’s so special with what we’re doing that this is now a topic for discussion? Well, being that we’re an autos website, we do plan on having a huge inventory of cars on the site some day. (That some day being sooner than later.) If you think about it… storing multiple images for hundreds, thousands, millions of cars can take up quite a bit of space. While we were playing around with some preliminary numbers yesterday during our meeting, we worked it out to about 300 gigs worth of thumbnails and about a terabyte worth of full sized images. That’s pretty funny because I think all the actual code for the site will probably be about two megs or less. (Maybe it’s easier if we just ran a porn site.)

So when we’re talking about these kinds of storage numbers… Uh… first off, no company I know offers a terabyte of storage on one drive on one dedicated server. The reason I’m even using that criteria is because anything beyond one drive will require special coding that I don’t understand. Anything beyond one server will probably drain our wallets faster than Paris can shop in 3 minutes. So for our sake, I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible. (On another note, if you have the money, you can opt for NAS storage.)

So what to do? What to do?

Well, there’s been a lot of talk about Amazon’s amazing, web 2.0, startup friendly web services that can help businesses scale from zero to infinity and beyond in terms of storage, processing power and etc. The Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Solution) is of particular interest to me because of its capacity and the fact the data is saved redundantly. If we use it, we *may* save thousands a month by not buying three dedicated servers to start to anticipate traffic. Then again, if they are ever to change their pricing again, we may potentially be screwed.

In terms of raw processing power, Amazon also offers the EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service. Like asp.net, elastic computing is beyond my understanding… especially since neither EC2 or S3 solution provides a simple way to setup a domain, emails and databases. I guess if we ever need to pull extended queries, maybe we can make use of EC2 separately from our servers but right now it’s in beta and it’s still a bit scary for me to commit to using the service.

So what else is out there? Well, The Planet, Rackspace, ServerBeach all offer great dedicated hosting with great support, but if we want to do one or two machine and do it right, we would most likely need RAID’s, backups, etc. all of which will eat into our bottom line. Hrmm, still no good.

During my research, a guy had also recommended hosting in a VPS like environment, except on a Grid. A grid? Grid computing - marketed to me as a elastic computing cloud but spread across different machines with true IP’s and the ability to setup databases w/o it disappearing into thin air if the server crashes. It sounds great and all, but is this really just a souped up shared hosting? Upon further research, it doesn’t appear that way, though, until (IF) we use it, I’m really not sure if it will provide all that much more benefits than just having a few dedicated servers.

That’s where we are for now… if any one has any hosting hookups or recommendations, we would love to hear from you. The goal of course, is to launch the business and not get stuck in an infinite loop trying to figure out how to change our code to work with various hosting environments. It’d be nice if there’s a hosting environment that’ll change to work with our code.