Article / 11th Jan 2011

New Ventures

For the past month and a bit, I've been working part-time on my new venture.

Along with Ben Firshman, I'm working on ep.io, a Python/WSGI hosting service, with resource-based (not instance-based) billing.

It's been an interesting ride - designing shared hosting so it's both secure and so you can measure and bill resources accurately is a difficult task - but we're finally out of the woods and have everything working reasonably normally, leaving only the slow crawl of beta-testing and polishing (and working out a payment provider).

We've also launched a blog, which only contains an initial post now, but it's where we'll be noting down what we've learnt, and general deployment advice, hopefully making it useful as a general learning resource as well as a corporate mouthpiece.

Initially we've focused on supporting Django, as it's the thing Ben and I use most often, but the entire stack was built with general WSGI applications in mind (and, indeed, they do run). The stack we've built is quite flexible, so it could potentially be used for a variety of different languages or frameworks, but we think focusing on doing Python (and doing it well) is a good goal.

If you want to keep track of what we're doing over at ep.io, it's probably worth following @epdotio, or subscribing to the blog's RSS feed. There's also a beta invite list you can sign up for.