As our company has taken shape over the last six months we have often needed help & support. One resource that has been invaluable is the great NextNY group. NextNY is a group of more then 600 pros in the internet & tech space here in NYC who communicate via a Google Group, and increasingly, through social outings, panel discussions, etc.

The New York tech scene (aka Silicon Alley) has had a bit of a renaissance in the last year or two. One example of this can be seen when Chris & I attended an workshop on financing & term sheets at the NYC offices of Wilson Sonsoni. They wrapped up this session by asking each branch (Austin, Chicago, Seattle, etc) if they had any questions. When the videofeed turned on for New York it was obvious that at least twice as many startup entrepreneurs were present in New York then any of the other locations- including Palo Alto. There is a lot of great energy in New York right now- and the NextNY group helps work as an outlet for it.

We recently held our own workshop with a group of NextNY members. Our purpose was to get feedback on the design & functionality of the site, ahead of buttoning it up for beta. The panel was at the offices of Sportsvite with 10 top tech-heads. A range of experience was represented in various areas of the web; design, usability, marketing, IT/tech, etc. We got much interesting (and occasionally quite opinionated) feedback on what people would want the site to do for them and how. While we were only planning on an hour or two, we ended up talking for more then four hours. Much of this input we’ll use as we make decisions on how to arrange the homepage, which functions to push and which to let fall back a little. There’ll be much to see very soon!

Here’s a picture from the event by one of the of the core members of NextNY- Charlie O’Donnell. He wrote his own wrap-up post about the day.

Well the server has arrived and is currently being configured by some of the best minds in the Ruby-on-Rails world (who have coincidentally just started a Google Group on Rails deployment).

For our first server we went with a Dell with Dual processor, Dual-core AMD Opterons, 2 GB of ram and a hardware Raid 1. It ended up being chosen by taking the servers we could afford and then dividing the price by the estimated SpecWeb score for web hosting performance.

Here’s the requisite just out of the box pic- soon it will be among thousands of friends in a co-lo.

We have the hardware and we’re fast making progress on the development- although there is still much to do. We expect to have the first version of the site opened up for testing soon- so be sure to signup now. If there are no big problems we’ll quietly open up to the public a month or so later. Then we’ll be rolling along and ready for a bigger launch with all the requisite fanfare. The countdown is on!

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.