Robby on Rails: Tag business

Review: Braintree

Robby Russell — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:58:00 -0500

Zack Chandler (author of the TrustCommerce gem) writes..

“How do you like Braintree? I’ve haven’t used them yet but may in the future…”

Good question. I was actually planning to write up a quick review of their exceptional service because not many people know about them yet. Now is as good of a time as any.

We’ve been using Authorize.NET for over four years as it’s what our primary banking institution hooked us up with when we began researching merchant services. However, they didn’t provide us with some of the subscription-based management features that we found with some other payment gateways and we began referring our customers to TrustCommerce. We planned to switch over to TrustCommerce with the development of Cobalt (our new billing and hosting support platform).

After we began to set milestones for going live with Cobalt, I tried to get in touch with TrustCommerce. I was provided a demo account and really wanted to get in touch with their sales department to get an application.

...a week goes by. No response. So, I tried to contact them again. No response. tried again… and (yet) again… no response. To date, I have yet to hear back from them.

This was echoed by one of our consulting clients that said, “their support staff seems real responsive, but I can’t get ahold of anyone to actually get an account.” So, I planned to start looking at other options or stick with Authorize.NET.

..and then (as if they were listening to my thoughts)... I receive an email from Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree, a payment processing company.

(snip)

“I am the founder of Braintree, a payment processing company. We provide credit card and electronic check processing, simplified PCI DSS Compliance through remote storage of credit card data, payment gateway/virtual terminal, etc. We’re a one stop shop.”

He goes on to introduce himself and explain that they’re really focused on subscription-based services, which is exactly what our new centralized billing app is handling.

So, since I hadn’t heard from TrustCommerce, I requested a demo with Braintree. We were able to take advantage of the hard work that has put into the ActiveMerchant project, which already works with Braintree. So, our application that we’d been focusing on integrating with TrustCommerce was just a few lines of code away from working with Braintree.

While I’m sure that many people have had great experiences with TrustCommerce (as I did when I worked with their support team while working client projects)... not being able to order an account isn’t doing them any favors.

So, we just launched and now running Cobalt with Braintree as our backend for managing recurring credit card processing. Their customer support has been great so far. In one case, I messed up some security settings and locked myself out and after they saw that I had failed to login a few times, I received a call from one of their support people. I didn’t prompt it… they took the initiative to call me. She said she’d look into it and called me back when she figured out what I had done wrong. :-)

On Monday afternoon, after I announced that we launched Cobalt on my blog, I got a congratulations from another of their developers who congratulated us and wished us the best of success.

So… Zack. To answer your question, “How do you like Braintree?”

My answer is… I think they’re fantastic so far. Their web interface for managing your account could use a few IxD eyes, but we like that it’s minimal and most importantly… the core functions of their product appear to be working great. Our team has now talked to roughly 5-6 different team members at Braintree and have nothing but great things to say about those interactions. Great customer service that definitely seems to echo that they want their customers to be successful and are here to do what they can to provide us with the tools we need to fulfill our goals.

I only wish that we had the same service from all of our vendors.

Bryan, thanks for introducing yourself. You have a great team.

For more information, visit http://getbraintree.com/

Be Careful that you don’t Stub your Big Toe

Rails Business: Year Review for 2007

Robby Russell — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:54:00 -0600

Happy Holidays!

Wow, 2007 has gone by really fast. I’ve been fairly busy wrapping up projects and getting ready to start new ones at Planet Argon. I’m sure that when many of you start a new project… you look back at what you’ve learned from previous ones. Even throughout iterations in a project, we try our best to have retrospectives to be sure that we’re all learning from what has and hasn’t worked. A few weeks ago, I decided to drop a note to the members of the Business of Rails community to ask people to share some of their lessons from the year. My goal was to get people to share their experiences from over the year with other members of the community and see where the dialogue takes us into 2008.

As expected… I got some great responses, which I encourage you to read for yourself. You might even participate in the conversation(s) and share your experiences. We’d love to hear them.

Side note… I’d like to thank all of you who have participated in the Business of Rails community over the year. It was an idea that came to me during RailsConf 2007 after I participated on a panel with other business leaders in the Ruby on Rails community. We now have over 800 members on the mailing list! I’ve learned a lot from the community and hope more of you decide to join. :-)

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #4

Robby Russell — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:59:00 -0500

As I mentioned in my last review, I wouldn’t be updating on a weekly basis, which is a shame because there are so many fascinating discussions going on that might benefit you if you’re running a business that uses and/or relies on the Ruby on Rails framework. I’d like to highlight some of the discussions that have been taking place over the past month or so.

First off… wow! As of this morning, there are 650 members!

Some Recent Discussions

Obtaining Ruby Gigs

Johan Pretorius started a discussion with the following…

“I’ve been lurking on the group for a while now, the time has come to participate … What strategy would you recommend for somebody that wants to break into the Ruby (on Rails) market?”

On a related topic, Jose Hurtado started a discussion asking for tips on how to get a reputation in the Ruby on Rails community for you business.

Some of the responses included:

Start a portfolio
Contribute to Open Source projects
Contribute to Rails through Documentation
Subcontract through well-known developers
Start a blog
Write a book

Read the entire thread and please share any other ideas that you have on this topic with Johan, Jose, and rest of the list. :-)

Taking a full-time job, what about your freelance clients?

Oren writes, “I got a full-time job offer as employee (and not on as a contractor). My current client might need some help on the weekends in the next month, so I might still do contract work. Can I keep my corporation (corp S) while working full time?”

Read the responses

Reality Check!

Starting your own business might sound like an amazing thing to do, but it often comes with a lot of consequences and struggles, which I’m definitely not been immune to.

Michael M. writes, ”...added to having to create a company, perform customer support, continue to grow the features, marketing, and the loads of other things I haven’t thought of yet…is there any hope that one person can pull this off while still working at my current job ( with hopes of going it alone when I’m sure it can fly ), and giving time to my family, with very little up front costs. I’ve been reading quite a bit about bootstrapping lately, but to really make the time has been very difficult.”

There were several thoughtful responses where well-known members of the Ruby on Rails community, such as Joe O’Brien Ben Curtis shared through personal experiences.

Joe O’Brien wrote, “I wanted to mainly chime in on the family part. Something that has taken a year for me to figure out how to balance. I would not have been able to do any of it, had it not been for my wife’s full support. I have three kids, all of whom I love spending time with, so figuring out a way to balance it all has been very tricky. Up front though, my wife and I knew this would not be your typical job. It helped that I used to travel and now do not, but it has still been an adjustment.”

If you’ve been running your own Rails business, please consider responding to this thread and sharing your experience.

Join the Community

As mentioned, this is just a small sample of some of the great discussions taking place on the Rails Business mailing list. If you’re an aspiring Rails freelancer or business owner, be sure to join the community and share your experiences and learn from other members of the community that are willing to share theirs.

As always, have fun!

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #3

Robby Russell — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 10:37:00 -0500

It’s been about six weeks since the last Rails Business “Weekly” Review on here, so perhaps it’s worth changing the name to cut me some slack on not being consistent. ;-)

Since the last post, we’ve gone from around 400 members to 555 as of this morning. We’ve had 562 messages as well, so there hasn’t been a shortage of discussions taking place. I’d like to take a few moments to highlight some of the discussions that have taken place and encourage you all to consider participating, if you’re not already.

Licensing and Client Agreements

Tim Case writes,

“My client sent me this agreement drawn up from their lawyer that included the following:

(c) the Contractor shall not bundle with or incorporate into any Work Product any third-party products, ideas, processes, software, codes, data, techniques, names, images, or other items or properties without the express, written prior approval of the Company;”

Tim then goes on to ask how his applies to using Ruby on Rails, which as a MIT license and how other consultancies are handling these types of situations. Follow the discussion…

Escrow

Gustin writes, “Does anyone have any escrow experience, legal and cost? I am dealing with a client that got burned bad and we are reducing their fear with escrow on the first two iterations.”

Follow the discussion…

Project Planning tools

Mike Pence writes, “So, I used to use MS Project for the composition of those dreaded Gantt charts, but it has been a few years since I had to be so formal. Anything new and exciting – and more robust than Basecamp – happening in the world of project planning software?”

Follow the discussion…

Not long after, Jim Mulholland started a new thread on the same topic and brought up the open source application, redMine. Follow this discussion…

Ruby on Rails versus .NET

Michael Breen asked a big question on the list, which has sparked an going discussion about the benefits of using Rails versus .NET (and other platforms).

“A couple of months ago I decided to stop actively pursuing .NET gigs to focus on Rails. Several of my existing .NET clients have learned of this through the grapevine and have contacted me to discuss.”

Follow the discussion…

Three things Tim’s learned from Freelancing Rails

Tim Case shared his experience of freelancing with Ruby on Rails and highlights three things that he’s learned.

The non-code business aspect of Freelancing is demanding.
It takes 10 hours to bill 6 to 8.
Figuring out your rate is hard.

Read the rest of Tim’s observations and the discussion the followed.

Client issue tracking and documentation

Jeff Judge writes, “Hello all! I was curious to here how people are handling client issue tracking and documentation.”

Several applications were mentioned for handling issue tracking and the general consensus was that there was still a lot to be desired that current options didn’t provide. Be sure to follow the discussions…

Join the Community

These were just a small handfull of the discussions that have taken place over the past several weeks. If you’re an aspiring Rails freelancer or business owner, be sure to join the community and share your experiences and learn from other members of the community that are willing to share theirs.

Until next time, have fun!

Rails Code Audits and Reviews, continued

Robby Russell — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 12:47:00 -0500

In response to my article, Audit Your Rails Development Team, Tim Case writes,

“I think what you are doing has value and I’ve been anticipating that someone in the rails community would step up and do this, hence the question I posed because I’ve thought about that thorny issue too. I have a feeling Planet Argon is making the first step in a direction that has been building, Peer review has the potential to be positive for the entire community, provided that it’s shepherded properly and with care.”

It’s been just over a year since we first made a public announcement of our Rails Code Audit and Review service and we’ve had different types of clients inquire about it. We make sure to call it a code audit and review because we’re not aiming to only point out flaws. We see our service as a way to help stake holders gauge the capabilities of their developers while also providing developers with some more insight to how things could be done differently. There are a lot of developers using Ruby on Rails now and it’s safe to say that there are many that aren’t very good yet. Some may argue that the ease of getting started with Rails makes it easy for inexperienced developers to stay just good enough and never take the next step. We’ve seen some beautiful code and we’ve seen some horrific code. Some of our clients have made the tough decision to fire their existing freelancers after we’ve completed our analysis… but we’ve seen several situations where our clients were happier with their developers after.

For example, we recently completed a code audit and review for a client, which came to us with some concerns about their development team. Things seemed to be going slower than they thought it would and really wanted to have an outside opinion about the quality of their work. Overall, their application was being developed really well and the biggest problems that they had were related to a lack of testing. So, we’re now walking them through the process of integrating RSpec into their development process. Their development team admitted that they suffered from a lack of testing, but were very honest about the fact that they just didn’t know where to begin as it wasn’t something they had time to learn before. We’ve been able to provide them with some direction and now we’re available to answer questions and review their work from time to time. The outcome was good for everyone. The developers are better off because their manager has more confidence in them. The manager has more confidence in the product as a whole and knows exactly where his team should focus their attention on next. We’ve gained a new Rails consulting client and get to help them with their cool project.

While we love working on entire projects from start to finish, we also love working with other developers and development teams. This has been one of our favorite types of client relationships. We’re currently working with a handful of people as they work their way through the project life cycle and we’re always a phone call, Basecamp message, or email away from assisting them. I feel that these types of services are important to the Rails community, because we’ve witnessed situations where clients were unhappy with Rails because they weren’t happy with their developers. We’ve seen people drop Rails in favor of something else because of the poor quality of code that was being written in Rails. When bad perceptions spread, it’s bad for the community as a whole.

What we can do, is become the backup team for the client and/or development team. Should they run into any weird deployment issues at 2am on a Sunday morning or aren’t able to track down the cause of some performance issue, we’re another set of people that can help out. While we don’t know every nook and cranny of our consulting clients’ applications, we do have a good understanding of them. This allows us to dive in and help more quickly than we can for clients that call us for the first time a few hours after they had an emergency.

It’s my opinion that these types of services are very valuable and highly encourage other consultancies in the Rails community to offer them.

If you’re part of a development team and/or a freelance developer and looking for this sort of relationship, please contact us to see how we can assist you.

Rails Business: Weekly Review #2

Robby Russell — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 01:26:00 -0500

First of all, I’d like to welcome the more than fifty people that have joined the Rails Business group since my last post. Over the past week, there were less posts, but we did cover a few important topics, which may be of interest to you.

Subcontracting

Michael Breen asked a few questions about subcontracting for larger firms and how people set their rates when doing this. Several of the responses provided some personal experiences (good and bad) of being a subcontractor on large projects. Where some risks are and how to negotiate your rates, when applicable.

Read the discussion

Change Requests

Nick Coyne started a discussion on how to manage change requests in an Agile development process.

Dealing with large clients

There was also a discussion about how to go about responding to a 150 page RFP for a large client. A few of us offered our experiences of bidding on large projects. Read more

Join the Community

The list is about to pass 400 members and it’s already proving to be a valuable resource for all of you entrepreneurs out there. I encourage you all to introduce yourself.

For more info: http://groups.google.com/group/rails-business

Audit Your Rails Development Team

Robby Russell — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:05:00 -0500

Several months ago, a few of your colleagues decided to join forces with you as you had come up with a concept for an innovative web application, shared the ideas with your friends and relatives, and began developing a business plan. After a few months of performing some initial market research, working on your pitch, and raising some initial funding, you decided to bootstrap the project and start designing and developing the product.

During your research phase, you came across several articles about this exciting new technology called, Ruby on Rails. You were impressed with many of the sites that were being developed on this new framework as well as the community that surrounded it. Your team decided that it would be a great idea to follow this trend and use Rails as the platform for your new product.

At this point, you began soliciting freelance developers and/or firms to hire for the design and implementation of your project. Eventually, you make a decision and break ground on building the product.

Let’s jump forward to the present day.

You’ve been in heavy development for quite some time. Your product has gone through a series of design changes and you’ve recently begun to allow other people to begin testing the application. You’re receiving a lot of bug reports as people use the system. Your development team quickly fixes them as they appear, but you’re noticing a trend in the development process.

The speed of implementing new features is drastically slowing down as your development team is spending most of their time fixing bugs. Along with that, they are becoming frustrated by the project because they can’t keep up with your new feature requests while trying to keep up with your growing number of bug reports. You’re becoming concerned about the stability of the product and are slightly suspicious that your developer(s) might not be as good as they suggested they were.

Did you hire a bad development team? Chances are, you may not be able to tell. You’re not a developer, so reviewing their code would almost be a waste of time. How would you know if they were doing a good or bad job? Your developers reassure you that things are going to work out in the end, but it’s going to take longer then originally planned. Along with this, your partners and investors are anxiously waiting for you to launch the product, but something feels wrong. You’re worried that launching it too soon could be the quick death of the entire project if it all comes to a screeching halt due to unforeseen bugs and problems with the application. This wasn’t how you pictured the launch of your exciting new product and you feel a lack of confidence in the entire process.

What can you do?

Before I get into that, let’s discuss some of the possible causes for this situation.

Your development team may have grossly underestimated this project.
You might have pushed too many features into the initial release of the product and your development team might not have done a good job of helping you determine what you need, not just what you want.
Your development team might not emphasize testing enough in their process.
Your development team may have begun to take a lot of short cuts in an effort to hit your launch date(s)
Perhaps you asked for quick turnarounds on new features before an investor meeting… maybe this happened on several occasions.
Your development team might not be very good with Ruby on Rails, maybe this was their first Rails project.
...and so on.

At this point, the big question is… what’s the problem?

Can you answer this question yourself? Can your development team answer it? If not, what do you do? How can you get an accurate understanding of how stable the code base of your application is?

Answer: An independent code audit and review

Why is this a good idea? Well, when you have an independent team review your code, you get the benefit of having a fresh perspective.. and often times, an independent team can be much more critical and provide an honest assessment in a very short period of time. This is especially true if they have a lot of experience with the technology. For example, PLANET ARGON has been conducting code audits on existing projects for over two years. We’ve designed a process for checking existing code bases for mistakes that we’ve either made ourselves in the past or found in other projects that we’ve reviewed.

In fact, our process currently walks us through the following areas of your Rails application.

Security of the application
Privacy of users’ personal data
Adherence to the conventions of the Ruby on Rails framework
Scalability of the application
Performance of the application and data model
Testing framework and process
User interaction (when applicable)
Information Architecture
Model-View-Controller (MVC) implementation and organization

Not only does this process provide you with our analysis, but we also provide you with our advice as to where your development team should focus their attention next. If your team is lacking experience in the areas that we recommend they focus on, we’re also here to help them through this with our consulting services. We’re currently assisting several Rails development teams with their testing process, refactoring, user interaction design, optimizing their site, improving their deployment strategy, and plan the implementation of new features.

In general, most freelancers and firms could/should provide you this service, but it should not be performed by your existing development team. They have a bias towards their process and this is your chance to get a second (or third) opinion on the work that you’ve been paying them for. If you’re spending several tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars into this product, an independent review of your investment should be something to seriously consider.

There are several different scenarios that could lead you to deciding to have an independent firm perform a code audit. In fact, I’d encourage you to always get an outside perspective of your team’s work.

To learn more about the Code Audit and Review process that we provide, call us at +1 877 55 ARGON or contact us online.

Rails Business: Weekly Review #1

Robby Russell — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 17:07:00 -0500

This past week (give or take a few days), the Rails Business group has covered a lot of topics, that might be of interest to you, should you be running a business and using Ruby on Rails. Many of the members of the new group are independent contractors and have been very open in sharing their experiences of working for themselves. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few conversations and tips that were covered this past week.

Health Coverage

Mike Pence started a conversation about health coverage…

“Has anyone else found the medical insurance issue to be a show stopper for them? Are you one doctor visit and diagnosis away from financial ruin? I can tell you firsthand that wishful thinking won’t pay those bills…”

This started a discussion about how people are able to work on their own and maintain health coverage, which is definitely not something that should be considered lightly. Read more…

Client Expenses

Another great question was raised by Mike Breen.

“I’m going to start work on my first project that will require me to travel. How should I handle the expenses? Do I build the costs into the contract price or do I submit the expenses to the client for reimbursements? Or does this vary from client to client based on the company policy?”

The responses included links to IRS sites and sections of other peoples’ contracts. Read more...

Hosting Client Repositories

Where do you host your client’s source code repositories? Are you managing it all yourself on your own servers or using a service?

The discussion (so far) has lead us to evaluate our own solution for this at PLANET ARGON. It appears that everyone has different concerns about how they want to manage client code during the development cycle.

For example, do you allow your client access to trunk/ if they aren’t all paid up yet?

Also, it seems like there are a bunch of new commercial options coming out (and are built on Rails). Read more...

Naming Your Business

Jared Haworth writes,

“For those of you who are working as ‘independent developers,’ have you found that it makes more sense to simply do business under your own name, for example “Jared Haworth L.L.C.,” or to come up with a clever business name instead, such as “Code Fusion Studios”?”

This was a good conversation to follow and definitely raised a lot of great questions and things to consider in response to the original message. Read more...

Ruby on Rails gets down to business

Robby Russell — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:53:00 -0500

It’s been a week since I announced the new Ruby on Rails meets the business world group. Already, the group attracted over 300 members from around the globe... from Argentina, Boston, Australia, Florida, Seattle, Portland!, the Netherlands, and South Africa.

We’ve already seen some great topics come up… from:

Project estimates
Fixed bids versus time and materials
Pricing
Handling code ownership with client contracts
Incorporating (LLC, S CORP?)
Managing money/accounting
Contracts

I expect that many of these topics will resurface and there has been a lot of valuable information passed around. It’s exciting to see that so many people not only want to use Ruby on Rails as a platform of choice for their business ventures, but they’re also willing to share their personal experiences and knowledge to help others move into this space.

If you’re running a business that focuses on Ruby on Rails or just considering it, you should stop by and introduce yourself.

update: membership grew from 200 to over 300 in the past day!

Ruby on Rails meets the Business World

Robby Russell — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:36:00 -0500

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of being up in front of several hundred people with the following individuals on the the Business of Rails panel at RailsConf.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

Moderated by:

Nathaniel Talbott, President, Terralien, Inc.

The Victims:

Justin Gehtland, Founding Partner, Relevance
Geoffrey Grosenbach, Topfunky
Andre Lewis, Earthcode Studios
Joe O’Brien, artisan, EdgeCase, LLC
Robby Russell, Director, PLANET ARGON

Overall, the experience was fantastic. I really enjoyed the questions that Nathaniel and the audience threw our direction, both during and after the session. Throughout the remainder of the conference, people would catch me and present complicated business questions to me and ask for my input. I think that I even helped one guy make his final decision about which job offer he was going to accept (btw, did you decide yet?). It’s always great to share my experiences of leaving my last full-time job (3+ years ago), moving to Rails exclusively (2+ years ago), how Allison and I went from two people in an attic to seven people in an attic in about a month... to having an office in downtown Portland and clients around the globe. I’m also always happy to share my not-so-happy experiences throughout the past few years as well. Running a business is hard stuff as it comes with a whole lot of responsibility, which can lead to stress. It was great to know that the rest of the panel has had their difficult experiences. While Rails makes everything feel easy… running a business is a whole different spectrum of challenges. ;-)

At one point during the session the audience was asked, “How many of you are considering starting your own business based on Ruby on Rails?”

The response?

Based off of my extremely scientific calculations (looking around the room), I’d estimate that around 30-40% of the audience raised their hands! Wow. It was fantastic to see that there was that much interest in people starting venturing off onto their own. Imagine… a flood of new companies, competing directly with us… and guess what? I think that’s awesome! Awesome for Rails. Awesome for future startups. Awesome for everyone!

Let’s face it. Rails isn’t going anywhere for a long time.

So, now that the conference is over, questions have begun to appear in my email box. Thank you all for writing. What if you could have a sounding board to throw questions to on a regular basis? Unfortunately, our session only lasted a hour at RailsConf and too many questions weren’t gotten to. Well, I’ve asked the rest of those on the Business of Rails panel to join me on a google group, titled, Ruby on Rails meets the Business World.

If you’re looking to (A) start your own Rails-based business, (B) already run your own Rails-based business, or ((C)) have business experience that you’d like to share with those in camp A and B… then join the community and start some conversations.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to learning from you all and hope that my experience of co-founding and leading PLANET ARGON can be of benefit to all of you.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

Portland Public Transporation and the Zen of Office Management

Robby Russell — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:33:00 -0500

One of the coolest parts about my job (aside working with cool people everyday)... is getting a say in where we spend some of our money as a company. One of the things that Allison and I decided that we really wanted to do as a company was encourage sustainable business and growth in our local community. Everyone here loves Portland, Oregon.

This screenshot was taken after we took headshots for our transportation passes.

Our awesome Office Manager, Nicole Fritz has started a blog, which she plans to, ”...not only to let people know what goes on behind the scenes at PA, but to give other startups hints and tips about cool admin things that I have learned along the way (from taxes to how to get the right people “on the bus”).”

Nicole has posted an article, which introduces people to some of the great tax credits that small businesses like PLANET ARGON can take advantage of… in particular how we are now taking advantage of a tax credit for public transportation, bike storage, carpool programs, and more.

If you’re a customer of ours or are running a small business… you might consider subscribing to her feed.

Rails Business Hosting Encourages Weekend Getaways

Robby Russell — Sun, 28 May 2006 12:34:00 -0500

Wow, it’s only been two weeks since the PLANET ARGON team announced our new suite of Rails Business Hosting plans and the response has been great! Some of our existing customers are taking advantage of this and upgrading their accounts and moving to the new exclusive resort of Rails hosting.

A few people have asked some important questions about our new Rails Business Hosting plans.

Can I use it as a reseller account?
- No, this suite of plans is targeted towards businesses who need a more isolated environment for hosting their new web application running on Ruby on Rails! This would violate our 10-15 customers per server arrangement.
How is this better than my own VPS?
- We’ll admit, a VPS is a nice option and would be a competitor to our new plans. However, one key difference is that we manage the server for you. Not all developers are also Unix system administrators. We’ve been hosting Rails applications for well over a year and understand the complexities that surround deployment and hosting them and leverage this experience when we architect our hosting environments.
Do you have documentation for your new plans?
- Yes! We’re modeling our environment to be very similar to our standard rails hosting plans, so the information being collected on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project is accurate. This also makes it easy for you to move from one of your current accounts to the new service as only a few variables will change.

How many of you have taken a long vacation and not needed to worry about your servers and applications staying up? We’re hoping to help you take that cruise, those three weeks on a tropical island, or the rafting trip your friends keep talking about.

We’re here so you don’t have to be!

Learn more about out Rails Business Hosting plans.

Robby on Rails: Tag business

Review: Braintree

Related Posts

Rails Business: Year Review for 2007

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #4

Some Recent Discussions

Obtaining Ruby Gigs

Taking a full-time job, what about your freelance clients?

Reality Check!

Join the Community

Rails Business: "Weekly" Review #3

Licensing and Client Agreements

Escrow

Project Planning tools

Ruby on Rails versus .NET

Three things Tim’s learned from Freelancing Rails

Client issue tracking and documentation

Join the Community

Rails Code Audits and Reviews, continued

Rails Business: Weekly Review #2

Subcontracting

Change Requests

Dealing with large clients

Join the Community

Audit Your Rails Development Team

Rails Business: Weekly Review #1

Health Coverage

Client Expenses

Hosting Client Repositories

Naming Your Business

Other Topics

Join the Community!

Ruby on Rails gets down to business

Ruby on Rails meets the Business World

Portland Public Transporation and the Zen of Office Management

Rails Business Hosting Encourages Weekend Getaways