Account Spam
By Mike on February 2nd, 2010I love applications. I love to try out new ones.
One of the biggest barriers many applications have is the sign-up process. You have to balance the information needed to create an account, with the effort a user goes through to enter that information. Many times the user looses in that tradeoff. I wanted to make the sign-up process as easy as possible for our apps. In fact, we need only 4 items from a user: first and last name, email, and a password. (And, by golly, we will soon combine first and last name into one field):
One Step Registration
Further, the goal of Raveal is for others to discover you. We spend quite a bit of effort in getting our Raveal profiles indexed with major search engines.
The side affect of these two things is that many “Search Engine Optimization” douche-bags have caught on and are creating accounts for spamming search engines. Of course, none of us here have any patience for these practices and shut down the accounts within minutes of being created. Luckily, the flow is just a trickle. However, I do fear that if the number of spam accounts increases, we’ll have to put measures in place that increase the amount of effort new users spend on getting setup. And that pisses me off!
So we’ll do our best to not mess up a good thing while keeping these spamtards out of our system.
New Home
By Mike on February 1st, 2010Over the past month, I have been hard at work migrating our applications to a new home.
Typically, any application service created in the past few years runs “in the cloud.” Ours was no different. We opened our doors running on a grid provided by 3Tera (http://3tera.com). They have a unique twist on virtualization that really stands apart from the rest of the industry. They take object oriented programming principals and apply them to virtual machines. This can be described by a simple comparison between VMWare and 3Tera:
- With VMWare, you have to startup a virtual machine and then log in to the OS to configure settings.
- With 3Tera, the OS resides in a “black box.” You configure settings with the black box. Internally, when the OS starts, the black box hands off the settings to the OS. I.e., the OS never has to be started to configure it.
Much like creating a class in programming, the class has functionality hidden from view. You set values for class fields and it does something for you. What this means is you can easily create a catalog of virtualized OSes that are trimmed down to task specific appliances. E.g., you have a DB appliance and a Load Balancer appliance. You then reuse these appliances in your applications by pulling them out of the catalog and configuring them.
The technology is pretty amazing. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the solution wasn’t working for us. We were seeing a significant amount of nodes in our cluster failing due to hardware and software bugs and datacenter mis-management.
So we began the process of moving to a different platform. As these things do, it took longer then expected. But that’s okay, because, in the end, the migration happened flawlessly. As of 2 AM EST last night, all of our services have been moved over to Joyent (http://joyent.com). For those hip on hosting providers, you’ll notice that this move involved a switch from Linux to OpenSolaris! Yes, we are all converts now and absolutely adore what OpenSolaris has to offer.
You should see a bit of speed increase in accessing the apps. Latency might be a bit better for our European customers as the DC is in New England now. If you notice anything strange, feel free to contact us over at http://support.flowz.com.