I don't get it... there's no content, and it requires me to sign up, just to search? I would suggest you add some sample content that is publicly viewable.

When you go to Pinterest, you Pinstantly know what the site does.

:)

Thanks for your feedback.

You can also share content besides searching and view lot of content like local events, tweets, deals, viral pictures, videos and much more.

We also think similar to facebook and twitter that publicly showing user's content like pinterest is violating the privacy of users.

We are continually working to improve the user experience please keep on checking us back.

Thank You.

Two dead companies do not make a live one... SonicWall lost their edge 5 years ago, and now they compete with the likes of Pfsense and M0n0Wall.

As a former SonicWall customer, I MUCH prefer PfSense to their products, and the price is MUCH better... FREE. SonicWall, You lost me by holding back feature updates to nickel and dime me into upgrading to an ever-increasing support contract.

Dell, since you are flushing money down the hole these days, how about you send me some. I'm sure I can make a better return on it than you can.

Cheers! :)

Dell is "dead"? I suppose relative to the incredible profits of Apple, every other company is dead.

I'd offer a commission to the producer of the traffic, based on conversion after beta. Anyone can generate traffic, and even signups to a free beta.

Getting users that are qualified AND interested that will convert to paid accounts is very difficult, and if whomever is referring users isn't gaming the system, they should have faith that their referrals will convert to paid accounts.

I agree.. the page is hideous. I personally would never consider using this service. Two things I would recommend..

a) visit themeforest.net and buy a theme, apply it, and add lots of screenshots. Here's one I like from MojoThemes (not affiliate link, no affiliation at all) : http://www.mojo-themes.com/item/magnolia-a-responsive-html5-...

b) make it exclusive. People will pay more money to get into something if they think they can't.

You can accomplish this if you limit the number of users by a certain date, or close it altogether, just like Google did with GMail. If you require an invite code, AND the site and offer are compelling, within hours of doing this you will see forum posts indexed in Google where people are asking for invites.

Finally, post some invite codes on this site, and see what the uptake is.

Good luck, I hope it works out for you!

I'm in Dallas and would be interested in talking to you. You can contact me via justpythonit@gmail.com.

I would suggest running your own half rack or full rack at a local colo facility, and integrate amazon or azure into your external scaling strategy using APIs to spin up instances on an as-needed basis.

You should always be in control of your core databases, and never allow an external vendor to be your fallback position or failsafe.

The odds of both Azure and Amazon having an outage at the same time are very very very small, especially if you span your instances across multiple zones.

Allow your local servers to be a fallback to the cloud, so that when (not if) there IS an outage, you have a controlled set of servers to rely upon.

It's really hard to make the decision. We priced up co-lo at our local data centre and the costs are good and would save us money, it's just a massive headache. Network switches, redundant lines, internal vlans. They are all a pain in the ass, the only person at current who would manage that is me and I need to be developing really.

Obviously you don't know our company structure so I'm not having a go there! We have gone through this process and pricing already and it's ideally an area I want to stay clear of. I would prefer the responsibility to be somewhere else.

It's really hard making any decision, I just want a reliable solution where everything just works. Whenever I seem to settle on something then something happens at one of the companies and I'm deterred.

I do appreciate the comment though and if I do ever get the day when there is someone dedicated to sorting this then I'll be dogging them to get this solution in place, the mythical 100% is the end goal

Try Python with Django.

All the benefits of ROR, many fewer headaches.

Not knocking ROR, just saying I've been down this road and what I found was Python/Django was ultimately exactly what I was looking for.

Cheers!

Well, for me, it's readability and maintainability. I find Ruby unreadable, and if I want to hire a programmer, it's easier to take a Perl, PHP, or even C# developer and teach them Python than it is to teach them Ruby, at least from my experence.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Ruby as a language, and until it was added to most languages, the scaffolding held me in awe...

I just prefer Python's readability.

I agree. I am a PHP developer and just started learning Python a few days ago and must say, for now, it is indeed easy to learn and is very readable. Though I never tried Ruby so I can't tell you if I would find that easy also.

> until it was added to most languages, the scaffolding held me in awe...

I'm not sure what you mean by "the scaffolding", could you please explain?

Good point! Python is very nice to read

Unless he has a non-dilution clause. If he does, it will likely become a very sticky issue with VCs.

there's no non-dilution clause. it's more that this never would have gotten off the ground without him, so we'd rather not knock him low.

Both.

Amazon has a habit of going down when you least expect it, and while the outages aren't usually system wide, you want an off-site backup site that can handle some percentage of the traffic, even if it's just a "we'll be right back" page.

Additionally, if all your data is on Amazon and it has a catastrophic failure, it's can be lost forever. Your databases should be hosted on your own network as Amazon can't guarantee that nobody will have access to your network segment but you.

If you take credit cards, be especially careful as the service level you choose may not be PCI compliant, which is required by most credit card companies. Read this (may be out of date): https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=34960

If you use their payment system, they do claim to be PCI compliant.

Regarding bandwidth, in your example, you show $8/mbit for bandwidth. I get 300mbps for $3/mbit from Cogent, and $6/mbit for a 100mbit commit.

Additionally, the example shows reserved instances at 51 and self-hosted instances at 131. This implies that Amazon's reserved instances are somehow magically more than twice as powerful as self-hosted servers.

EC2 Reserved instances are NOT an instance type, but rather a rate plan, and Amazon's servers are notoriously slow (and shared), and in my experience there's no way an Amazon EC2 instance is going to outrun a standard dual or quad-core XEON server in a self-hosted model.