The bad news for startups keeps on coming in. This time it’s RubyOnRails application hosting provider Engine Yard that has laid off 15% of its staff, as publicly reported on the company’s blog earlier this week. We’ve contacted co-founder Lance Walley and can confirm that 12 out of 82 people have been let go, across several departments.
The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker has been updated accordingly.
Engine Yard, which essentially delivers a platform to build, manage and host Rails applications, raised raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Amazon last July, with investor Benchmark Capital also participating. The round brought its total amount of funding to $18.5 million.
Competitor Heroku also attracted substantial funding in 2008, but they have been spared from significant lay-off rounds so far, at least to our knowledge. Other alternatives to Engine Yard include Joyent and Rails Machine.
Unsurprisingly, Lance Walley added that the lay-offs are part of a ’slight course change’ that had been in the works for several months already, and that Engine Yard is in perfect health. Also noted is the fact that Walley is no longer the CEO of the company, and that they’ve appointed John Dillon to assume leadership of the company in order to meet new profability (and other) goals.
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“allow clients to scale their Ruby on Rails applications quickly and effortlessly.’
Oxymoron.
So is Marketing Ninja.
@probablycorey +100
That’s a double dose of douche (marketing ninja)
hahaha
*giggle* *giggle* *snort*
Get it? Because marketers can’t be ninjas because… *giggle*
*giggle* *giggle* *snort*
look at the awkward marketer wanna-be try to make a funny…. *giggle*
Not really. 90% of projects run great with out-of-the-box Rails, and for the ones that need to scale to serve huge traffic volumes, the changes are painless because the code is so easy to maintain.
It’s probably because Rails is so easy to deploy now, with Passenger and Apache.
engine yard doesn’t compete with some dude setting up mod_rails with apache on his 256 slicehost slice.
engine yard has serious hosting, builtin scalability, starting at 300$ / month and going up to several 10s of thousands of dollars a month.
Its targeted at your typical rackspace customers that want to run rails apps
New Relic is not a hosting company. Additionally, New Relic has a partnership with EY to provide their Bronze monitoring package to EY customers. They are not competitors. I suggest clicking through to your own CrunchBase description of New Relic.
EY and Heroku’s business models are different and both companies provide different services. Sure, they’re both Rails-centric, but they’re barely competitors.
Absolutely true, corrected the post, I think Joyent is actually closest as a competitor.
Here is a video interview I did with Lance Walley http://tv.smibs.com/2008/08/13.....gine-yard/
I am sad to hear that they had to let some people go. We like their service and hope they can maintain the quality.
New Relic aren’t competitors to Engine Yard, EY provide hosting, New Relic run performance monitoring services. Even Heroku is so-so, because it’s a radically different service.
Their competitors are more like Slicehost, Rackspace, RailsMachine and other webhosts.
Engine Yard also laid off 4 of the 6 people on the Rubinius team back in November.
http://blog.engineyard.com/200.....and-future
82 employees is way too many for what they are doing and where they’re at.
EY is a managed hosting service and thus needs lots of support staff. It’s not that many people when you consider how many customers they have that want to call 24×7 about anything regarding the deployment.
Best of luck to them - we run a large app (10 mil pv/month) with them and have been pleased.
Indeed - we’ve worked with EngineYard for about 18 months now. It’s been a pleasure to do business with them.
We just today posted an article about our Engine Yard experience on our PMOG game/community weblog http://news.pmog.com/2009/01/0.....wers-pmog/ - we wish them the best; they’ve helped us be more creative and flexible with our backend technology as we build our game in a Firefox toolbar.
It always sucks to have to let good people go, we will miss all these folks. That being said most of these layoffs were support staff and the reason for layoffs was that we have gotten much more efficient and automated so we don’t need as many support folks to handle our systems.
And the puters stay puting…haha
lol
I have heard good things about Engine Yard. Hope they can survive this brutal economy.
Maybe we can see a hike in the plan rates.
What a joke. Their South Park office, all that money wasted on a business that does not scale.
All it takes is 1 bad coder to bring down all client slices on the servers. 1/200 will kill the other 199.
JoyEnt has the same issue. Underpowered, underprovisioned, terrible service.
Whatever.
Lance Walley provides additional context in this new blog post.
http://tinyurl.com/95tbdd
I’ll also comment on Whatta Jokke’s post. It’s partially true, but to a MUCH smaller degree than described, and ONLY on our most basic offering.