Hi all,
Thanks in advance for any help.
I've been contracted by a company to develop a website; somewhat of a 'social networking' site that's fairly complicated. I'm working by myself.
My background is as a developer in Java and .NET. I've worked as a lead developer/architect on dozens of large projects for mid to large-sized companies.
Though a little off topic for this post, let me say that I chose Ruby on Rails because of its simple but helpful API. I found ASP.NET to be ridiculously complex and poorly documented. Its seemingly elegant solutions prove to be too difficult to implement in practice. Indeed, you spend way too much time trying to do things that should be simple and straightforward. Trying to understand the flow of control amongst web controls is something I never plan to do again. As for Java, there seemed to be way too many disparate parts/frameworks that one had to master for the pluming of the application. In my experience, the pluming is only a small part of an application. I don't need it to do too much. Just offer fine grained tools for the basics and stay out of my way. Also, I enjoy working with interpreted, weakly-typed languages like Ruby...and it's perfect since I'm not developing software for rocket science.
My issue is this: I'm in the midst of developing the code of the application, but I'm realizing that I need help setting up and supporting the operation of the application. I've been able to learn what I need, and write code very fast, but the hosting and runtime support of the application is something that with my limited experience, I'm spending way too much time making sense of. I'm not sure what my options are and I was wondering if anyone had some suggestions.
I chose to go with TextDrive for my hosting, and decided on their solaris container solution (which is virtually having your own machine). Once I paid, they simply sent me an IP address and some passwords and that was it. Thus the offering that I chose assumes that I'm pretty strong with my system admin and configuration skills, which I'm not. Only their shared solutions provide some documentation, but I'm not sure how much it helps, and that you don't need to have strong sys admin skills with that solution too. It's possible that I didn't chose the service that suits my needs.
It seems to me that with Ruby and Rails, one can single-handedly develop pretty sophisticated web applications. But without additional support to setup and operate the site, this may not be a reality. How should I connect from my Windows laptop to the Solaris box in terms of editing my files? What about the setup for Subversion? What's inetd? What about backing up my repositories? Which is the best application server configuration for rails?
Can't I just get back to the code?
I need an organization who helps set these things up and helps to keep the system running smoothly, making sure that logs aren't going to overflow, that sessions are destroyed, that backups are performed, etc. Someone who's done it before.
Is there not an offering of this type? Some organization that provides these services? Not just a company that offers hosting solutions, but that has services to help you along the way? Where I can pay for a full-time person now, and later a part-time person. I can't afford to find and pay a local full-time sys admin who would need to ramp up on supporting rails. Can't I find some organization that can offer these services at a lower price since they also do it for dozens if not hundreds of other rails developers?
Sorry if I've been long-winded or repetitive, and thanks again for your help.
James