Midnight Oil

I noticed the other day that some of the organizers in The Scene (ie. Atlanta startup culture) are hosting a meetup to talk about the next steps needed by the startup community. In big bold letters are instructions detailing that possible attendees should evaluate themselves according to these criteria:

Who SHOULD Attend

If one of the following phrases describes you then you SHOULD attend this event:

• Entrepreneurs who “Swing for the Fences”
• Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists and Institutional Investors
• Service Providers that service the Startup Community
• Other Supporters of the Startup Community Ecosystem

Who Should NOT Attend

If one of more of these labels describes you more than one of the previous labels then you SHOULD NOT attend this event:

• Lifestyle Entrepreneurs (emphasis mine)
• Small Businesses using the Web for marketing
• People who prefer the security of employment
• Developers, Designers, Freelancers
• Internet and Network Marketers
• Interactive Agencies

No Lifestyle Entrepreneurs?

As a recovering wannabe “Swing For the Fencer”, I’m dismayed at the specific exclusion of lifestyle entrepreneurs. When did running a successful-but-not-Google-size business become a failure? Wouldn’t The Scene be much better off with dozens or hundreds of successful small businesses as opposed to a handful of mega hits and hundreds of failures? Let’s keep this list growing at a healthy clip, while keeping this one as small as possible. I know people love to throw around fail-fast as a mantra, but I prefer to win-slow. Successful small business that pays the bills? Put me down for one, please.

In my own experience, I was only able to truly get a shot at success when I stopped swinging for the fences. When I stopped dreaming about VC money, IPOs, and a Google buyout, I set about to actually building a revenue model for my projects. In addition, I stopped pursuing ventures that had no underlying business model besides the get-big-get-bought prayer. All of a sudden, I started making money. It’s not a lot, but it’s growing. I bunted my way to first base, and now I’m trying to figure out how to steal second.

After playing with Twitter for a couple months now, I’ve decided that it’s really not all that useful as a way to express my thoughts and feelings. I spend a lot of time trying to come up with witty zingers, but nothing I say ever generates any real commentary. My gut feeling is that very few people actually read what I tweet, which is a little humbling and disappointing. More and more it feels like I’m screaming into an ever-more-crowded room filled with people screaming. We’re all trying to out-scoop or out-zing each other, in 140 characters or less.

Conversely, this blog has always felt like a calm, collected place where I can express my thoughts and interact with a small group of interested readers. The majority of my posts generate little traffic and zero comments, but I know they’re read by my close friends. However, I’ve had several blog posts that have generated a great deal of commentary. I provided some thoughtful analysis, and people felt compelled to comment (often after some baiting on Hacker News or Twitter). The readers learned from my experiences, and they added their thoughts. The postings remain visible and can be easily found via Google. Finally, many of the posts still generate traffic and comments even months or years after the original posting. Try getting response to a tweet even 6 hours after the original posting.

For these reasons, I’ve decided that I’m going to reduce my time spent on Twitter and instead try to collect my thoughts into real, thoughtful writing. If I feel the itch to go tweet about something shiny, I’m going to ask myself if it’s something that I really think people care about, or am I just acting under the same impulse as the people who write “First!” in comments on Youtube. I’ll still succumb every now and then, but I think I’m over Twitter.

Update: I’ve also found that going on a massive un-follow campaign can vastly improve your Twitter experience. Clear out all the cruft: celebrities, brands, logos, and especially the chatty egoists who never shut up. Once you pare it down to just friends and a handful of personalities, Twitter is much more enjoyable.

Hosting a Rails app has always been a bit of a pain. Standard shared hosting was always pretty much out of the question, so most people naturally migrated to some sort of VPS. The obvious upside of being able to do whatever you want is a big draw. However, there is a dark side to every VPS: sysadmin work. Updating with patches, installing software, setting file permissions, and all that plumbing takes a lot of time. Then, there’s the big-daddy of them all: managing your own SMTP server. Sure, turning on Postfix or Exim is pretty easy. I just hope you don’t mind it when all your emails disappear into spam boxes.

For Obsidian Portal, we have been happily hosting with Slicehost for a while. Their uptime has been great, and we appreciate their services like automated backup and DNS management. However, we have been handling all our sysadmin tasks ourselves. So, when Ryan recently met one of the representatives from Blue Box Group, and he said that they’re happy to handle all that for us (at no additional charge!), we were quite interested.

Since we’re currently spinning up DoLeaf, we decided it would be a good time to see what we can get with a more hands-on hosting provider. And, after just a few days, we’re very impressed.

Choice of Distro

Blue Box’s basic installation is some flavor of Red Hat. Ryan and I are Ubuntu guys, so this was a problem. A single email to the support staff: “Hey, can you rebuild our server with Ubuntu server edition?” Answer: “Yep, it’s done.” Awesome.

Firewall

Anyone else think iptables is a bit of a pain? I can use Firestarter or Webmin, but when I try to manage it manually, forget it. Luckily it only has to be done once. Or, in the case of BB, never. Just send an email with the ports you want open. They set it up and replied, plus added a few standard ports that we forgot.

Rails Stack

BB supports several different Rails stacks. We’re used to Apache2 + Ruby Enterprise Edition + Passenger + Rails 2.3.2 + MySQL 5. Even though this kind of setup is pretty straightforward, it always seems to take me at least 1-2 hours just to get things set up in the most basic configuration. Now? You guessed it. Send an email and I’m done.

Functioning SMTP – The Great White Whale

We’ve always had problems with emails disappearing en-route. Getting Postfix set up is a 5 minute job, but your emails randomly get flagged as spam, especially by the big boys like Google and Yahoo. There are many different ways to counter this, like SPF and DKIM, but they are a pain to set up, and it’s always tough to know if you got it correct. This was the tipping point for me with BB. They have an SMTP server preconfigured with SPF and DKIM and you can use it for sending emails from your app. They limit you to 750 emails / hour, which is way more than most apps need, especially in the beginning. Considering that we had evaluated similar solutions that wanted to charge $0.01 / email, having this included for free in our hosting plan was mind blowing. Never again will I host anywhere that doesn’t do this.

And the cost?

The most surprising thing is that I haven’t been charged $0.01 for additional support. I’m still testing the waters to see exactly where that line is, but so far, I haven’t hit it. Plus, their prices are quite competitive. Slicehost is a little bit cheaper, but when you factor in the time saved on setup, I’d say we’re already way ahead.

We’ve only just started with Blue Box, and things may go south at some point, but for now we’re ecstatic with what we’ve received. If you want to spend more time coding and less time on irritating sysadmin tasks, then I highly recommend taking a look!