Hey guys, we are looking for a a few blogs to sponsor. We would like to specifically offer sponsorship for developer focused blogs with about 2k visits per month min.

Email sponsorship@webbynode.com directly so we can chat. Pass this message along: maybe we can sponsor someone you know.

Thanks!

Carlos.

After today’s big release we have received a lot of requests for helping new customers migrate to Webbynode from other cloud & vps providers.

It’s that time of year again. Very exciting news from your folks here at Webbynode.

It has been a few months of being very quiet, but we have been very busy working on today’s release – wich we are very excited about.

This release is part of the process to provide more value to our customers, and we have brought a lot of new features as well as a new pricing structure.

The new pricing structure is now live for new customers, and also for active customers – who will be charged the new prices on next month’s invoice.

We’re proud to present the new pricing table:

* Webby 256 $9.99
* Webby 384 $14.99
* Webby 512 $19.99
* Webby 768 $29.99
* Webby 1024 $39.99
* Webby 2048 $79.99
* Webby 4096 $159.99

Rapp Officially Live

Our Rapid Application Deployment framework, Rapp, is now publicly available. And there are tons of new Rapp features too!

Extensive Engines Support

• Full support for Rails 3 RC1 and Bundler RC;
• Improved Rails 2 support;
• Bundler support for Rails 2 and Rack applications.
• Beta support for Django 1.2.1;
• Improved PHP support;
• Node.JS support being released in the upcoming weeks as an alpha preview.

Improved Usability

Alternate SSH Port: You now can use Rapp even if you changed your SSH port to make your Webby more secure.

Smart defaults: We now don’t require you to tell us which Webby you want to deploy to, if you happen to have only one. It was kind of obvious, right? We also add your SSH key to the remote server by default, so you don’t have to type your password over and over again.

Add-ons

One of the most exciting news regarding Rapp is the addition of addons (pun not intended).

With one command you can manage which addons you want to install along with your application.

We support Memcached, Beanstalk, Redis and the long awaited MongoDB.

Multiplatform

Rapp already worked great in Linux and Mac OS X. However, a very requested feature was always Windows support.

We have now a dedicated tutorial to explain what you need to install to make Rapp work in your Windows machine. Go check it out.

And, on top of that, you still have all the goodness Rapp brings:

* Amazon S3 Backups
* Git Workflow Deployment
* DNS Integration
* PHP / Rails 3 / Rails 2 / Rack side-by-side support
* Webby handling (reboot, restart, etc.)
* Deployment hooks

32bit & New OS versions.

Alongside with these exciting Rapp improvements, we have released more two long awaited features: 32-bit OS support and Ubuntu 10.04 support, both 32 and 64-bit. With that pack, you also get the following new OSes:

* Ubuntu 10.04 (32 and 64-bit)
* Ubuntu 9.10 (32 and 64-bit)
* Ubuntu 9.04 (32 and 64-bit)
* Debian 5.03 (32 and 64-bit)
* CentOS 5.4 (32 and 64-bit)
* Fedora Core 12 (32 and 64-bit)

Thats the news for today! Enjoy the new pricing and new features. Let us know what you think and leave a comment.

Today we noticed that the amount of email from our contact web form had diminished. It turns out it was totally down for a few days. We just received a lot of emails and have replied to them all.

We’re really sorry for this, easy communication is one of our personal pet peeves.

If your email was not replied please send it again via the web form, or email us directly at service@webbynode.com so that we can take care of you.

We have opened up the Rapid App Deployment Beta for users with VIP Accounts, so be welcome to subscribe and start trying it right now.

If you don’t have a VIP Account and would like to participate in the Rapid App Deployment Beta, apply by submitting this twitter post, and we’ll get in touch with you. We will only be accepting a limited amount of applicants, so apply soon.

APPLY NOW

Please note that support for this feature won’t be handled by our regular support page. You should use our forum to report problems and ask for help instead.

One of the things we enjoy the most are interesting overall ‘geeky’ links, whether they refer to linux, mac stuff, office design, web applications, etc. We’ll be sharing some of the links we run into each week.

10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass

Open source and freeware server/network monitoring tools that will supervise your infrastructure for any issues that may arise.

Stereomood is a free emotional internet radio

that suggests to me the music that best suits my mood and my daily activities.

Scout Labs: A web-based application that tracks social media.

I have been using ScoutLabs 30 day trial to monitor the buzz around Webbynode, and its been great so far. I would definitively recommend it.

Build a Simple Password Strength Checker

MacHeist: 6 top Mac apps for Free

Chorus – Discover Apps with Friends

Nice little iPhone app that helps you to discover hot new iPhone apps from your friends. Chorus enables you and your friends to review apps and share opinions.

CompareMyDocs

Compare and merge multiple versions of a Word 97/2003 or RTF documents online.

OmniDiskSweeper

Free little Mac app that helps you to save disk space. It shows an overview of the folders that takes more space in your Mac, enabling you to drill down and find your space hungry files.

Add jQuery datagrids to your Rails apps

Amazing plugin to add AJAX based, jQuery grids with goodies like ordering, pagination, searching, all without reloading the page. Check it out!

Quick Lessons from DevDay

This poorly named blog post teaches you how to make your ERB tags to be sanitized by default. Up to rails 2, if you want to sanitize your HTML output, you have to use <%=h var %>. Starting in Rails 3, this is done automatically. Find out how to do it in Rails 2.

Here at Webbynode, we started recently to use MongoDB as the backend for a new feature we’ll be unleashing soon.

So far, we used the fantastic backup gem astrails-safe from Astrails quite a bit for our database backup needs.

To fulfill the new demand of backing up MongoDB databases, we created a fork of that gem that supports MongoDB for backing up as well: webbynode-safe.

We’ll be publishing the source code in GitHub soon and also submitting a pull request so hopefully we’ll soon have MongoDB support built into astrails-safe.

A new blog post with complete coverage of how to use it will follow soon, so stay tuned.

Link: http://gemcutter.org/gems/webbynode-safe

I’m sorry Its been a while since our last post. We have been very busy behind the curtains working on some big new features, but we’ll talk more about that later.

VIP Accounts

The 1st big announcement we have is that – we’ve ended the initial promotion we had that gave you 15% off for new accounts. We ran this for a few months and it did great. If you have any friends who have a VIP account, they have 5 VIP invites to share. So bug them so they give you one, or always try twitter – a lot of people are willing to share those.

Something very important – we’re re-sending out invites for those of your who never claimed them. This is the last chance to become one of the initial VIP Acount holders, after this you’ll only be able to get one if someone who has one invites you.

Referral System

The other big announcement we have is that we’ve released a new affiliate system which has been one of the biggest request so far. Basically, the way it works is:

• - You refer someone and they use your email during sign up.
• - They keep a Webby for 90 days.
• - 90 days later you receive 50% of total of the 1st month

Also, this applies to VIP members, so if you have a VIP Account and invite someone to get a VIP account this applies as well.

Enjoy!

If you’ve read our blog lately, you are probably aware that we’ve sold out, and only doing instant activations for invitees. However, we are now expecting a 48-72 hour delay for all new accounts. First priority will be for those who already paid and are waiting to be activated.

We’re working as a fast as we can to get new hardware in, so we can keep provisioning Webbies and keep up with our customers needs. The main problem we have is for the amount of time it takes Dell to ship servers to us, and yes, we are now using all Dell servers now, it helps us save time since we don’t have to put them together ourselves. But there’s nothing to worry about, we’re expecting some servers to be delivered and ready to go by Friday July 24th.

We’ll be rolling out all new Webbies that are placed from today until friday on those new servers, and we should have a new order of servers arrive here a week after that.

In the end, we just want to be 100% transparent with our customers, and not give false time frames for getting a Webby. Our goal is to get everyone on board with the new batch of servers as soon as they’re ready to go. We thank everyone for their patience, your messages of support and caring, really motivate us.

Update: Delay is now down to 24 hours.
Update: Webbies are now activated instantly.