Setting Up A Startup - It's So Easy Now!

I am constantly amazed at the high quality of many open source projects. I've worked on a number of them myself and can understand some of the reasons why people contribute free time to the projects but it still amazes me at the quality of some projects. This post gives you a general idea of all the tools we used to create our startup.

When we built ProductCritic we took advantage of as much open source software as we could to reduce our upfront costs.

As mentioned in an earlier post the site runs a virtual private server. It's running Ubuntu Server using Lighttpd as the frontend webserver and FastCGI to run the Rails applications. Eventually this will be upgraded to use Mongrel and possibly Apache but the current system is working fine in our environment and I see no reasons to change it at the present.

We are using PostgreSQL as the database server for no other reason than I prefer it to MySQL. For the type of application that ProductCritic is, (Digital Camera Reviews) either database server would be fine.

Subversion was used as our revision control system for code. A custom script runs every night on the server to backup the Subversion repository, PostgreSQL database and uploaded files. These are then downloaded to my personal server. If our server vanished we would be up and running in a few hours on a new server with the only the data of the current day being lost.

The site is deployed using Capistrano that uses a custom script I wrote for a previous site to manage the FastCGI processes.

Google Analytics is used to give us our stats.

The site was programmed using Ruby on Rails on a MacBook using TextMate and the Terminal.

We used a free Basecamp account to organize our task list and archive useful messages. During development I found that to be quite motivating in checking off our long lists of tasks and seeing them completed. We used a Writeboard to compose our launch announcement which worked out quite well as a number of people collaborated on that document.

It really is very easy (and inexpensive) to create a Startup on the Internet now. Focus on your great idea, gather some friends (or do it yourself) and go for it!