Close to Launch

We were trying to meet a February 1st launch but as you can see by this post we’re not quite there as we’ve ran into some issues.  I’m pretty confident this week is our launch date though with the web site all but done and more testing than anything else going on at this point.  Our initial fleet as far as servers are ready which initial fleet means one machine but it sounds better when I say initial fleet of servers.  Although the advantage of having Softlayer is the fact we can deploy new machines in under 4 hours and probably have them online accepting customers within 16 hours.  So it’s not like we need to have all these hot spares available anyways unless we like to waste money.  I’m pretty sure users will be impressed with our web site once it goes live and the attention to detail we’ve taken with it.

So for the server it’s up and configured and we’ve been testing it for the past 72 hours and making sure it’s configured 100% properly for the launch.  That it has all the initial launch software and we’re not going to be making changes when customers on it.  Although I say that even with Hawk Host we always forget something or something is not being replicated out and we manually add it then forget to add it to our deployment scripts for next time.

For the web site we’ve been real busy bees on January 31st we had 14 code revisions posted to it’s repository.  It feels like a lot in a 24 hours span with the amount of code changes I see in the repository.  Although the web site is just one part of it though there is a lot more to hosting than just the web site.  For the host themselves though the web site should be a major priority it’s where you gain customers not what is on the back end typically.  So we’ve had everyone running through the web site and if they find any issues post them to our project management system so that they can be resolved.

We’ve also been pushing out more and more changes with our system to track usage.  You test it all you want on a non production server but seems like when you bring in what is the final version and have people look for issues you tend to find a lot more.  So we ended up having 10 revisions on that front to resolve issues with tracking of usage, recording usage and usability problems discovered when we had more eyes checking out the system.

So things are looking great expect a live web site to come up soon and a launch announcement.