Well, there’s a limit. For years I heard about how great Wikipedia was, but whenever I visited the images wouldn’t load, and half the time the text page itself would timeout before it finished loading.

maybe you can edit and then delete this last comment

sorry for my English

p.s. also my sister lives in Mill Valley, San Francisco.
So if you’re not coming here soon I can see you there the next year.

Next time you came here, write me.

I live in Venice and I would like to talk with you about personal projects, web engineering, and photography also.

Bye

It’s a neat idea, and I’m interested to see what you guys do with it and WordPress. But the jury is still out in my mind on whether or not it’s necessary.

Your perspective gave more balance to the post. Yes you are right, twitter at the moment, or rather since i have known it has always been unreliable yet, it still gets new signups…

The power of the cult maybe..haha

@WordSkill: What Matt means is you can use the Gear’s LocalServer functionality (http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_localserver.html) to bring down bundles of your web application’s user-interface, such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc. Then, Gears will serve this up to the browser whether you are on- or off-line, so that the UI ‘flashes’ on to the page quickly. Standard HTTP 1.1 caching is fine for many uses, but because Gears can bundle a set of UI resources and efficiently update them things can be faster in some scenarios.

In terms of overloading a users machine, you want to be intelligent in what you push down. You obviously would not push down all of Wikipedia Instead, bundling up your static resources can really help, especially if you have an Ajax style application that is primarily driven by JavaScript or more classic web apps that have Ajax sections. Check out the PubTools open source library I made if you want to see some simple utilities that make this stuff much easier without having to delve into JavaScript (http://code.google.com/p/gears-pubtools/).

Wonderful insights!

There is a great article very related to this topic in the current issue of Wired, “Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today” by Spencer Reiss.

I think you’re insulated from a lot of the bad choices that startups make because you have an excellent team — particularly Barry. That speaks volumes about how your company was able to attract and hire top-of-the-line talent so you don’t have to worry about hosting.

However, I have to say, Wordpress is not typical in this regard. Because of your superb team, you’re able to use unmanaged dedicated servers and have your team work out all the kinks. Even so, I know you had problems with a particular unmanaged dedicated server provider in SF.

What I’m saying is that your success is not typical. It’s far more typical to do what Twitter has done and assume that Verio can handle “everything” and then 1) refuse to hire and 2) let go of anyone on your staff who knows anything about scaling.

When I talked to the Twitter guys, I was shocked to find that they had decided to outsource huge scaling to their hosting company without having a “Barry” on their team who really gets this stuff. And they outsourced to a hosting company that charges a lot of money, but no one on their team knew enough about it to understand whether the hosting company was feeding them a line of BS.

Your experiences cannot be applied to most startups. All startups that expect to massively scale need a “Barry”. But your post seems to imply that unmanaged hosting is still the way to go for these startups. I have to disagree.

Optimally, most startups should pick managed hosting AND have a “Barry” on call. Barrys are expensive, but worth their weight in gold, and it’s to him and your team that you owe your decision to go with unmanaged hosting. Without him, I don’t think you would have nearly the success you’ve had with unmanaged hosting.

-Erica

“Google Gears is going to change the web as we know it today – LocalServer will obsolete CDNs as we know them”

Do you mean that you see the user’s installation of Gears slurping down the entire website/blog in the background, giving desktop app speeds as the user surfs within the website? Wouldn’t that result in horrific bandwidth costs and CPU contention?

Also, enjoy Milan, awesome food but, seriously, be careful not to display an expensive camera when you’re out and about because Milanese muggers don’t ask, they crack your head from behind and, you know, we need you to not be brain-damaged.

Infrastructure will become a competitive advantage for specialist infrastructure providers. Application innovation will be done by specialist application innoators but few companies will succeed in doing both.

That’s why things like Google Application Engine are so important. They finally let application innovators forget about / no longer have to live or die by their infrastructure ability.