S3 the way to go for backups...

So I'm still a newb with all this web app dev stuff. One of the many worries as we get ready to deploy a real app - with real customer data - is backups.After hashing it over with Suren and Murali and talking with the hosting provider (ServerPoint - who so far haven't been very helpful, so may be x-provider soon).

My spiritual adviser at SpeedyRails, Maykel Rodriguez suggested S3 and he has the data to prove it.

For example, if you transfer 100MB every day to amazon s3, that's 3GB of data transfer-in per month, and then 3GB of storage (considering you only keep one month of backups), let's say you download 1GB per month as well and you have a total of 1000 requests (many http get/post requests)... this is... only 0.93 USD per month! LOL ... pretty cheap eh?

Here, do the math using the S3 cost calculator.

$0.93 BRILLIANT! EUREKA!

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The Monkey's alive!

live
Originally uploaded by roupen

What a trip! From buying my first book Jan 12 to an app deployed live as of this post - very cool. The last time I wrote code was 10 years ago after doing it for 10 years. The last time I wrote code was for embedded systems - not web.

I took a deep dive into Ruby on the 12th of January, 2008, and flintstoning.com is the end result. I'm proud ;-) What a difference a decade and the web have made when it comes to programming.

If not for the tireless help of Eldon Alameda, author of the book Practical Rails Projects. His code warrior instinct and patience are much appreciated. Also thanks to the good folks at SpeedRails.com and Maykel Rodriguez Rivero for providing the hosting and excellent and equally tireless support. Lastly, thanks for Suren for key hints along the way.

The app has a few cool things going for it. For one thing, some cool Ajax that allows for drag-and drop of todo items under "Today's Tasks" in the center of the page. Plus Chronic natural language time parsing (so when defining a task you could specify things like "tomorrow" "next month", etc. Very cool).

From newb to first app in less than 4 weeks. This has been fun!

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