An Essential Rails success story (and win a free book)

Posted by brian Tuesday, March 03, 2009 15:38:00 GMT

Dan Woolley writes:

I took your course in Chicago a couple of years ago – I think it was your first one. I finally left my comfy corporate job and went full time on Rails in July 2008. I recently released my first Rails app – Dwellicious (http://dwellicious.com). That is our free site for consumers that helps you organize, share, and discuss the search for homes for sale on the internet.

Congrats, Dan. Dwellicious is beautifully designed, well executed, and yes, has a real business model.

Are you a .NET developer who's turned to Rails? What's your success story? Link it up in the comments or e-mail us. We'll take the best ones, post them here, and send you a free copy of Rails for .NET Developers.

Comments

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  1. josh   March 03, 2009 @ 04:38 PM

    If I could just get time to get my app working on heroku (gem problems), I’d love to enter this contest.

  2. Dan   March 03, 2009 @ 10:21 PM

    My biggest problem would be hosting costs. I wrote spokt.com in ASP.net, I could port it to rails but I currently pay $24/month for shared hosting. I don’t think a 256 slice (or even a 512) at slicehost would be sufficient for our traffic. Heroku might be good but I can’t really deploy a production app to a beta platform. Woe is me: Champagne tastes on a beer budget.

  3. Sam   March 04, 2009 @ 05:20 AM

    @Dan, I really hope you read this. I’d really like to see some measurable data on your claims…I’m not bating you for a fight…I really would like to see it. I don’t need you to be exactly, but I hope you can provide things like:

    1) Requests per sec 2) Concurrent users

    Things like that.

    I’m well aware that a Rails app running on a small slice (I’ve a slicehost customer too) wouldn’t be able to handle much traffic…the whole low-end paradigm has shifted with passenger, which makes it tons easier, and I’ve heard tons of good things about it.

  4. Sam   March 06, 2009 @ 04:07 PM

    Hey Brian and Jeff, are you still hosting this site on a 256MB VPS? Do you know about a well built Rails site (with caching) running on a 256MB VPS that could handle significant traffic….I’m not talking anything on the high end here.

  5. Brian   March 06, 2009 @ 09:58 PM

    @Sam: It’s a 512MB VPS now, although it was on a 256MB slice for a long time. I have a couple of production apps with low traffic (hundreds of pageviews per day, not thousands) running on 512MB VPSes with no trouble at all. Feel free to e-mail me for more info.

  6. David   March 15, 2009 @ 02:06 PM

    @Brian – do you have sys admin to this VPS or di it yourself?

  7. Dan   March 20, 2009 @ 03:01 AM

    Hi Sam and anyone else with knowledge, I don’t have req/sec data. We serve about 25-30k pages per week… We are paying for shared hosting with a small company that mostly hosts “business card” web pages for local business, no traffic, no load, on a beefy server.

    I don’t know how much horsepower we’ll need in a rails host but last weekend I decided to go for it. I’m porting spokt to rails! I started a few weeks ago but I wasn’t sure if I would go through with it but now I’ve made the commitment and I feel so free.

    The catalyst for my decision was actually a misreading of the new EC2 reserved instance pricing model (see my embarrassing tweets to see how excited I was). So I don’t know where we’ll host it but that decision can wait for a few more weeks while I code using the best tools I know of.

  8. Reese Payton   March 25, 2009 @ 10:04 PM

    This is music to my ears, finally a good positive story in such depressing times. Good Luck and Keep Up The Good Work! Reese Payton