Developers love Engine Yard, the Red Hat for Ruby on Rails. And so do investors, who just plowed another $19 million into the startup, which hosts Ruby-on-Rails deployments.
New investors include DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon also participated. The company had previously raised $15 million in July, 2008 from Amazon and NEA, and $3.5 million from Benchmark the previous January.
Ruby on Rails is a programming framework for Web apps that is fast and easy to deploy. Engine Yard offers a hosted environment for Rails apps that is stable and up to date.
Congratulations. Any idea how far away they are from being profitable, if not already?
Congratulations to Engine Yard. We love you guys!
Engine Yard rocks!
Just playing devils advocate here, but $37.5 million for a hosting service? Couldn’t Amazon or Google or any of the other big guys add this support in their environments and undercut Engine Yard on pricing?
I’m sure they do a bang-up job, but in the end won’t they just be competing with the big players and see themselves get commoditized?
Engine Yard is very much a managed service. It’s the crème de la crème of the Rails world (if you can afford it.)
real developers use slicehost.
ain’t nothing like them.
honest, great service, much cheaper.
Yes, but not everyone is happy with SliceHost’s rates: http://statshee...-prices-in-2009
Maybe so, but ROR is quickly being surpassed by more advanced technologies. The investors will all lose on this one. Only wally will come out ahead.
What are the technologies that you’re referring to?
Jro,
We’re not exactly a hosting company, although we certainly have roots in hosting. Our focus is on delivering apps. Hosting has only ever been a means to that end. We’ve worked hard to build the right combination of operations, technology, and professional services to carry you from startup to enterprise. We believe that has made us much more than a mere infrastructure utility.
We’re all about making a solid environment that empowers a focused group of Ruby developers to deliver solid, scalable web sites.
Take a look at our Engine Yard Cloud product. You can deploy a Ruby app onto EC2, scale it, and have access to some of the Ruby community’s best developers if you get caught in a bind. No muss, no fuss.
Thanks for the clarification, that helps the picture. Will definitely take a look.
I am not convinced. Fixed ’slices’ are a strange concept relative to on-demand cloud computing, like AWS. It definitely sucks to manually place an order and then wait for a slice to be ‘turned on’; that’s so…Rackspace’ish.
AWS obviates all these intermediate hosting solutions, particularly with their reserved resource pricing.
@JonathanMarcus: EngineYard offer both the old-school service (what they call Classic – which drives me insane) and EC2 based services (Flex and Solo – which I haven’t tried).
I don’t understand what’s going to make people pay a premium for EY-managed EC2 hosting, vs plain vanilla EC2 hosting.
The big difference is that we do a lot more than manage EC2 hosting. We provide an environment that is not easy to create, and we work very hard to make sure that it is worth the modest premium you pay.
At the high-level, we try to own every problem below your application. This does not come with vanilla EC2. With vanilla EC2, if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. With EC2 premium support, well, you’re paying a premium again, aren’t you?
Assume that Amazon’s premium support, that you’re satisfied with the VMs. You still don’t get support on what’s running inside the VM. Your AMI, your problem. We maintain and tune an entire stack, from top to bottom, that runs inside. 64-bit compilation issues got you down? Not with Engine Yard. We have people that it is their job to make sure that thing compiles.
In fact, if you have a hardcore JRuby problem, we might very well escalate it all the way to the JRuby team. Rails3 vexing you? We can call in Yehuda. Need to figure out how to deploy and architect that application? Ezra to the rescue. There are also countless other very talented people that you many not have heard of, but that we employ to help you.
Even managing the environment itself is a dicey proposition. Read Amazon’s SLA. It’s very clear that EC2 does break, but it breaks predictably. Designing an environment that is resilient in the face of that breakage is not a trivial task. Despite all of the wonders of EC2, it’s still WORK to make it run.
All of these things cost time (i.e. money), and we help to amortize the costs, unify the effort, and spread the benefits among our customers.
If you’re developing a serious web application, you have enough work cut out for you inside of your own code. Engine Yard charges a modest and predictable premium on top of EC2 in exchange for the promise that you don’t have to work on anything but your application. It’s worth it’s weight in gold when you’ve got better things to do than fix any of the above problems.
Absolutely concur with Jonathan and Julian. And for what it’s worth, i’d advise any entrepreneur to stay away from anything that looks, smells or sounds like Rackspace. Trust me on the war stories. Rackspace, will skin you alive with aggressive salesmanship, lock you into deceptive pricing contracts (that will also turn out to be some of the most expensive boxes you’ll wish you never had), and then threaten to sue you if you dare try to adjust your setup to meet *your demand*. All under the banner of “best support”. Sure. For whom?
Other than a very modest minimum monthly commitment (that can be paid on fast-food-worker’s wages), you pay based on your usage. Engine Yard Cloud can be very inexpensive at both ends of the scale spectrum.
Always good to see EY continuing to grow. We’ve been happy, multi-year customers. Thanks guys.
TST Media
Engine Yard is a great host but just over the top expensive, especially at a time when cost efficiency is so important to all of us. There are plenty of RoR hosting firms that are dramatically more economical and have services as good or better.
Would be great if you could mention these – we need to promote the good guys equally as shaming the bad. This is the true power of social media. No longer will big bullies hide beneath their huge marketing budgets, at the expense of the true gems.
rubymon- Perhaps you haven’t seen the pricing for our cloud product recently? If not you should take another look because I think you will find that our cloud platform is very reasonably priced and is a better value then most other ruby hosts out there once you do the math for everything you get.