Being a techie, I’m preoccupied (probably more than I need to be) about hosting, the platform and hardware that will power the site. I’m a big fan of the Webhostingtalk forums. There is a ton of really experienced web admins on the site. If you are at all interested in web hosting tech, it’s all too easy to spend a ton of time in WHT forums.

We’ve been using a VPS on Liquidweb for over a year for our email and ftp needs, and just recently switched off of it to Google Apps for your Domain for our email. So far we’ve found it to be rock solid- although the lack of IMAP can be annoying.

For web hosting, we have been using shared hosting for testing and are going to move to our own dedicated server in the next few weeks. We had looked at a few highly recommended dedicated server shops, including Softlayer, Steadfast and ServInt, but decided that it made more sense to buy our own server, and put it in a co-lo. It’s amazing what 2 grand can buy you now in a server – two dual core Xeon processors and a 250 GB Serial ATA hardware RAID 1. It’s still up in the air what flavor of Linux we will be using, although lately Debian has been thrown around a lot.

We are lucky in having development partners that are also on the cutting edge of high-performance Ruby on Rails web hosting. They are giving us a ton of advice and will also be doing much of the initial setup and management. If we haven’t mentioned it before we are proud to say that we are developing fully in Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL for our database.

We are still in the decision making stage for much of this so feel free to email me with your advice and I’ll be sure to post an update once everything is up and running.