Posted by Luca on August 17th
At the current stage the tickets section is feature complete, I expect there are a couple of bugs here and there but other than fixing those I don’t think we will be adding any more features in the near future. As such if you want to use Juvely as a trouble ticket system now is the time to get started! Since we first released the beta we have had a large number of people sign up, but hardly anyone has began using Juvely properly. Anyway, we want to get your feedback so far, so we have created a Wufoo form to find out what you think! Don’t forget you can also contact us by clicking the feedback tab within Juvely!
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Posted by Luca on August 13th
Over a week and no post, I guess you will all want to know what we have been up to! Well last week the British Summer finally came (and went) so we were catching a few rays. We have also been working hard as well to add a few new features including suggested replies, attach other files and the brand new design that James showed in the last post!
This post isn’t about any of that though, this is about our backup solution (for now) which uses Amazon S3. Every night (around 2 in the morning) we have a nice little shell script that runs that backs everything up and stores it on S3. It is powered by some not-so-fancy Bash scripting and the Amazon S3 PHP Toolkit (phps3tk). It is nothing fancy - it doesn’t even delete old files so we have to do that manually. This isn’t really a problem though, and it gets the job done!
Anyway, I guess you will want to know how much this all cost? Well as we were backing up a mighty 30mb per day and it was running for half a month it was rather expensive. A grand 5p - yep 5 pence, or for you Yanks 11 cents!
There was also a hefty 1c tax….
We are happy with this, it is a nice reliable solution at a very cheap rate! One thing that may put some people off is that Amazon don’t provide any guarantees that data stored is safe. You get what you pay for though, if you want a guarantee your data is safe expect to pay a lot more!
Posted by Luca on July 29th
Over the past few weeks we have been busy working but we haven’t really said much about what we have been doing. Hopefully this post will clear things up a bit.
The (dv) server
The main thing we did before releasing the beta was moving from the unsuitable (gs) Grid Server to a (dv) Dedicated Virtual Server. After about a day waiting for MediaTemple’s customer support to give us root access, and another day for them to install the developers package we were free to do whatever we wanted with it! (Their responses were only a few hours but due to timezone differences and other commitments it took us two days to get it sorted).
After that we started to move everything over to there. Rather than using the default Apache we decided to roll our own version of Lighttpd (I couldn’t find the package manager). We then setup Fastcgi and PHP 5.1 to work together nicely and then after that Juvely flew along as you see today (before it was normal to wait over 10 seconds for a page to load!).
The next thing we did was move a few bits around within the Subversion repository then create some working copies on the server. After adding some stuff to hooks/post-commit all we have to do now is commit a new revision and our working copies automatically update! This saved tonnes of time as before this we were using a script we had to run manually to update it which took ages (note: we could have done this before, but I only learned howto while setting up the (dv)). We then setup the production copy of Juvely to use branches so we didn’t accidentally break anything.
Backups
A few days later I thought “Hmm, we had better have some sort of backup system”. I saw the MediaTemple offered a live snapshot system for the whole (dv) but this was another $20 a month, a bit too much as we aren’t making anything yet. So I did a bit of research and a couple of hours later we had an nightly offsite backup system that stores everything on Amazon S3. Backups are fully automated but every few days I still check it to delete the old backups, we could write a script for this but this adds some piece of mind. Anyway, the bill should be through next week (Im shaking in my boots!) so I’ll see how it compares to MediaTemple’s offerings on cost.
Communication
One thing that we wanted people to be able to do when we launched into the beta was to easily contact us. We setup forums, contact forms and email addresses but so far they have hardly been used. The forums are currently just holding our (rather poor) documentation and the contact forms and email addresses are just as bad. The contact us form on the site sends as email to support@juvely.com as does the one within Juvely. This email address is an alias to James’ and I email addresses. So hopefully you can see the problem: how do we know whether the other person has replied? Well, we don’t - so if you report something and get an email back from both James and myself, sorry! Anyway, we should be sorting something out in the next few days so I’ll post again then with what we did.
Righty, I think that is all I planned to explain today. I don’t think I missed anything, but if you know something I did miss or want to know more then leave a comment below! We should have a rollout later today or tomorrow with some new features, so keep an eye open!
Update:
We had an email from one of the MediaTemple Customer Support blokes saying they are glad to hear that that (dv) server is suitable for our needs! He said that he has passed on our suggestion about integrating root access and the developer tools into an option in the (mt) account centre! He also pointed out that the Plesk interface has a similar backup system included (at no extra cost) similar to what we are already doing. Details of the (dv) backup options can be found here.