Launch in beta, but don’t host on beta!
March 31, 2009
Never build your startup on sand; find a rock and start building there instead. Our team made the classic mistake of trusting a service to do something it was not designed or intended to do. GoGrid’s cloud computing service was released last year in beta. It has never been released for prime-time - i.e. it isn’t ready to host your mission critical applications and services. GoGrid never claimed their service was bulletproof - instead they put a very clear warning label on their brand: ‘beta’. Sometimes when you are ‘bootstrapping’ you go for cheap/inexpensive by default without reading the fine (or sometimes bold) print. This is a cautionary tale for everyone - launch your service as beta, but don’t launch it on someone else’s beta.
When we built ShopSavvy, one of our developers set up an account on GoGrid’s cloud computing service to host the backend of our development server. Just prior to our public launch one of our engineers, who is no longer with us, (for reasons I still don’t understand) built our virtual server on one of our hosting client’s virtual systems. When we realized what he had done we weren’t left with much of a choice but to leave ShopSavvy on GoGrid for a few days until we could rebuild the production environment on one of our blade servers.
Of course this planned migration never happened, instead it remains on our to-do list. Yesterday GoGrid crashed (for one or more reasons that aren’t worth mentioning) and after a few fits and starts they are still down this morning. Our team is scrambling to migrate our backend systems to our own blade server with Amazon as our backup backend. To be clear, GoGrid is a VERY cool service, but only for your development work.
