Dear Machinists:

Welcome to another addition of our irregularly published newsletter of Rails Machine happenings. Without reservation, this is the best one yet as we’ve had a lot going on. Please read on…

I have great joy in announcing the latest member of the Rails Machine team, Dan Benjamin. Many of you know Dan from his excellent Hivelogic blog, work on Cork’d, and talks at several Rails conferences. Dan joined us as CTO this month and is helping to roll out new products and community services. Welcome aboard Dan!

After a few months of collecting and organizing the responses to 1000s of support tickets, Rob quietly launched our support wiki. There are a number of great articles on Machine tune-ups, software installation, and troubleshooting. If you haven’t already, please take a look and contribute.

A few weeks ago, we completed an upgrade and migration to our new AtlantaNAP data center infrastructure. Improvements include a new network topology based on Force10 E-series switches, consolidation of servers to our private cage space, optimization of backup infrastructure, installation of new firewall/IDS appliances and increased transparency of network traffic. In addition, we have doubled our capacity at our Internap facilities. Steve has worked tirelessly on these projects for 6 months and it looks great!

In early February, I packed up my Jeep and headed down to acts_as_conference in Orlando. Presented by Rails for All, this conference had everything that you could want in a regional conference: intimate, affordable, informative speakers, and free beer. The keynotes from Dan and Obie were inspiring. After Dan’s keynote, I threw a free party at the Ale House where the conference attendees ate and drank an impressive amount beer! Congratulations to Robert Dempsey and his team.

Speaking of conferences, in just 2 months, we’ll head out to Portland for RailsConf 2008. Dan will be speaking on Entrepreneurs on Rails and I’ll be on the Scaling Rails panel. And yes, there will be another party. Stay tuned for details.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a concept called Machinix that focuses on deploying multiple instances of the same application capturing the best traits of both SaaS and customized installations. With Dan’s help, we finally launched a site for the service and hope to spread the good word of hosted virtual appliances to the people.

Last week, we updated the Rails Machine site with our new dedicated cpu core plans. I introduced these plans in December as a special and they were a big hit. We have discontinued offering the shared CPU plans to new customers, but existing customers can upgrade as always and prices will remain frozen. If you are on a shared CPU plan, you can also upgrade to a dedicated core plan easily.

What would be an issue of the Machinist without a hosting special? This is a good one so hold on to your Aeron:

Developer Sidecar: 512mb memory, 10gb RAID 1 storage, 50gb data transfer – $500 one time fee! No monthly or setup!

The Sidecar is the perfect complement to your existing service and will make an excellent staging or development environment. We can clone any of your existing virtual servers and save you hours of setup.

In order for us to offer this insane price for a lifetime service, we have a few restrictions. This is an add-on service and your account must have another full price service. We can not provide nightly backups, SLA, refunds, additional IPs, or 10.0.x.x network access. Additional resources require a regular plan. Only one sidecar per 4GB of existing service is allowed.

There are only 50 available at this amazing price. To reserve yours, please submit a new support ticket. The Sidecar will be available next week.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

Regards, Bradley Taylor CEO – Rails Machine, LLC

Here is the latest news from the Machine…

• We’re hiring Rails developers to work in Savannah on customer support and some really cool new virtualization products.

• The happy hour in the ATL was a blast and eventually migrated to a nearby blues joint for a few more pitchers. Thanks to all for coming out.

• I’ll be speaking on Rails at UbuntuLive in a few weeks. We should be launching Ubuntu-based virtual servers by then.

• We’ll be at RailsConf Europe in Berlin. Stay tuned for details on a party for the European customers.

• If you haven’t seen them yet, check out the awesome Rails ads from Machinist Gregg Pollack.

• We’re sponsoring the July Hackfest. Prizes include free rails hosting. A few Machinists are currently in the top 34 with Gabe da Silveira currently in the top ten. Get ‘em! The rest of you still have time to make an impact.

• For a limited time, you can get a 4gb dedicated server running Xen (aka XenMachine), for $475/month with $475 setup. This server will support upto 15 custom virtual machines. Existing customers can easily migrate their virtual servers to dedicated hardware with no system changes and only 5 minutes of downtime per VPS. For more information, contact us. Why have a slice when you can have the whole pie!

It’s been a long time, but better late than never!

I’ll be speaking at RailsConf in Portland on virtual clusters. If you’re going to be there, look for me. Stay tuned for party details.

If you don’t already know about Peepcode, do yourself a favor and check it out. Geoffrey has published two excellent screencasts that are of interest to all Machinists: Capistrano Concepts and Benchmarking with httperf.

Speaking of Machinist topfunky, Rails Machine got a nice review on Nuby on Rails. Thanks!

Machinist Ben Kittrell was interviewed about Doodlekit on Ruby Inside.

Machinist Alicia Shaffer’s Peanut Shell is going to be featured on the Tyra Banks Show this week.

Machinist John Topley’s AssetsGraphed was dissected on The Rails Way. He also has a nice writeup on setting up Mint with Rails Machine.

Machinist Andrew Stewart published some nice scripts for RM.

Machinist Craig Mackenzie has an excellent article on managing staging and production instances using Capistrano. I’m working on making this less painful. I promise.

Want to be in The Machinist? Drop me a line. Also, if you need it, I’ll share my recently discovered secret recipe for actually deploying using Capistrano on Windows! Or you can wait until I fix a bug in the rm gem and get it written up all pretty.

It’s been a few weeks since the first post. I’ve been waiting for some interesting news to pile up.

The big news is that we’ve been sold out of servers for almost a week. New servers are being installed this week and we will announce a new plan stuctucture including BIG vps plans.

Many of you ask about how many mongrels should you run for your app? The answer lies in the archives of Mongrel-users here and here.

Matz announced Ruby 1.8.5 last week. In a few weeks, we’ll update the RPMs.

Jamis Buck announced Capistrano 1.9 beta. Tread softly with the Rails Machine gem. There are some changes to Capistrano that may produce some unexpected results with some tasks. More details to come after I spend some time with it!

Rails Machine customer Kevin Clark’s post on Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing In Rails made the front page of Digg.

As a Rails programmer, please take the time to learn more about Ruby. It’s a great language. Dr. David A. Black’s Ruby for Rails covers what you need to know.

Today, Justin Palmer announced Mephisto 0.6. Since it was just released today, our Mephisto guide might be out of date. Send us your notes!

Next week, we hope to launch a forum based on Beast, a new lightweight Rails-based forum written by Rick Olson (Mephisto) and Josh Goebel (Pastie).

If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, please, without delay, order a spare 2.5” SATA hardrive and a SATA firewire enclosure. Then install SuperDuper! and mirror your drive every night. Trust me on this one.

UPDATE: You should backup all systems, not just MacBooks. However, the SATA notebook drives are bit hard to come by in a pinch, so you can greatly minimize downtime by having one handy, cloned, and ready to go!

Welcome to the first installment of The Machinist, a review of what’s happening at Rails Machine.

We now have a blog. But you already knew that, because you’re reading it. It’s powered by Mephisto built by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer. Its great. You should try it. Read the guide.

I’d like to welcome Dave Goodlad to the staff. Dave has extensive experience with Rails development, Linux administration, and Xen. Stop by the campfire and say hi.

Take a look at our new Frequently Asked Questions and let me know what we missed or needs clarification. Answers for installing PHP 5 and Trac are on the way.

If you happened to miss last week’s fun and excitement, please run gem update rails now.

Zed Shaw has released various pre-releases of Mongrel 0.3.13.4. mongrel_cluster has been updated to go with it. Official releases should be available shortly.

I’m working on a new package called Swallows that provides support for multiple installs and stages of the same application. A pre-release will be available in the next few days. Take a peak at an overview pastie.

That’s it for today!