As many of you know, Media Temple recently launched their Grid Server (gs) hosting line. The Grid Server product is meant to be able to scale with the needs of any web application it hosts. Some of the features of the plan include:

• 100 GBs of premium storage
• 1 TB of short-path bandwidth
• Host up to 100 individual sites
• 1000 email accounts
• 64 MB Ruby/Mongrel container

It’s the last bullet, 64MB Ruby container, that I want to talk a little about. From MT’s website:

Media Temple’s production Container technology provides your Ruby on Rails applications with isolated memory resources (64MB, 256MB and, 1GB) to rapidly deliver smooth, stable hosting performance. Our RoR containers come preloaded with MTR (our custom shell toolkit) simplifies Mongrel setup eliminating the need for legacy solutions such as FastCGI and SCGI.

I spent the last couple of days trying out the ruby container at Media Temple and it is fast fast fast. It’s a little confusing to get things setup because Media Temple has proprietary home grown tools for setting up your rails environment, but thankfully they have a pretty good tutorial, which covers the basics.

If you plan to build and deploy a rails app, I would highly recommend the MT ruby container for your hosting solution. It’s scalable, lightning fast and it won’t break your pocket book.

Helen Ubinas, a columnist for the Hartford Courant wrote what I consider to be a very important column a while back about Alyson Schupp, a woman who was recently fired from her job as a secretary because she didn’t smile enough. The reason I consider this important is because Helen touched on something that I’ve been feeling for a long time. Towards the end of her column when talking about the increasing requirement by employers for employees to give up much of their individuality, Helen made a swooping point when she said that “some of the last bastions of eccentricity are being destroyed by workplace homogenization.” When I read that, my mouth dropped and I thought, what a great point, and what a great way to write it!

Perhaps Helen’s column struck a particular chord with me because this is something for which I’ve sort of been on a personal crusade about for a couple of years now. After working in corporate America for 6 or 7 years, I had quit my job to start a web design company. Soon after, one of my clients, a tattoo artist, proposed the idea of paying me in tattoos. I agreed, and two years later 15% of my body is covered in tats. When I first started getting tattoos, I was hesitant with worries that I wouldn’t be accepted by some potential clients or that I could never get another job in corporate America. But then I smartened up and realized that if I was going to lose a client or get turned down by a company for a job because of the way I look, than this wasn’t a job or a client that I wanted in the first place. I could never work for or with someone that I felt was ostentatious or shallow, especially when it comes to judging others.

That’s why I don’t understand this opposition to human cloning, look around, it’s already been going on in corporate America for years. Everyone looks, talks, acts and dresses the same. The only difference is that this type of cloning is homogeneous instead of biological. I knew this two years ago when I started getting tattoos, and you know what? I’m glad I made a decision that can’t be undone because it will force me to continue to look at this issue for the rest of my career. Plus I get the added bonus of being the wrench that jams the corporate clone machine (a task which I’m more than happy to fulfill).

We’re about 5 weeks from launching DebtFolio with our credit card module. Until go live, we’ve added a nice landing page for visitors to register for updates.

Start Us Up HQ - Inside

Originally uploaded by Start Us Up!.

Our new office/art studio. Isn’t it fantastic! We move in on July 1st.