XP-Dev.com

rs on Wed 22 Apr, 2009 11:31:25 +0000

Over the past few months, XP-Dev.com has grown at a pretty good rate. I won’t really go down to actual numbers, but it’s suffice to say that it’s motha-$%&# huge.

Scaling it out has been the top priority in the past couple of weeks as quite a bit of work has been done to ensure that there are enough servers to cope with the increase in data and bandwidth, and that the there is a long landing field ahead for the coming months.

This morning, a pretty big upgrade was done to the infrastructure to be able to support repositories physically located on seperate servers. This is a good thing, and it will give current and new users unparalleled performance and responsiveness out of their repositories. It will give uber quick responsiveness to the project management suite as well.

Ultimately, all of this work costs money, and some changes have been made to the accounts and pricing plans as part of this upgrade.

No more backups for Free acount holders

Now, before you get angry, let me try clarifying this. CPU utilisation and disk space costs money. Backups use up the CPU and disk space. So, backups costs money. Its as simple as that.

In the past few months, backups were done overnight and used to take 5-6 hours a day to complete across all repositories. During these 5-6 hours, the servers would become less responsive, which resulted in repository access (commits, updates, etc) taking slightly longer than usual.

Live Backups for Pro account holders

So, backups are off the table for Free account holders. However, for Pro users (current and future), I’ve gone one step further in terms of backups. XP-Dev.com will not offer overnight backups or even hourly, because that’s just lame. Repository backups at XP-Dev.com are now done in realtime (maybe a few seconds slow, but you get the idea).

Repositories are replicated to a different server in a different data centre as soon as any changes have been made in the master repository.

The replicated repositories are read only, to avoid any unforseen conversations that begin with:

Dev A: "I checked it in"
Dev B: "No you did not"
Dev A: "I did. It’s there. Revision 1231"
Dev B: "No, I checked in revision 1231"
Dev A: "Oh wait... "

In the event that a server does goes down, failing over to the backup repository is quite straight forward, and the best part is that you can just carry on working. That means less downtime for you and your team, and that means higher productivity.

Account changes

Free account Subversion hosting space has been decreased to 500MB whereas Pro accounts have been increased to 2000MB at $40/year.

Current Free Account holders: Your quotas are unchanged. You can take a deep breath and relax.

Current Pro Account holders: Your quotas will be upgraded to 2000MB at no additional cost. You can jump up and down in excitement now! You’ll see the change in your accounts in the next few days.

To be honest, at $40/year, you’re getting some really cheap Subversion love. I mean, thats the same as $1.67 per GB per month. I don’t think there’s anything out there at the moment that offers so much value at such a cheap price.

SSL access for Free acount holders have been dropped

XP-Dev.com SSL certificates have changed. They are now signed by a trusted CA. If you’re on a Free account, you can still access your repository till the end of May 2009. I will be putting up a reminder closer to the date.

If you’d like to carry on accessing your repository over SSL, please do upgrade to a Pro account as soon as possible.

The future of XP-Dev.com

There have been plenty of changes in the background for the past few months. At the moment, I’m effectively juggling two jobs. I sleep 5-6 hours a day on average (no, I am not kidding). I wake up really early in the morning, hack on XP-Dev.com, go to work, come home, do some non-techy work for XP-Dev.com, eat and go to sleep. This sequence repeats the following day. I’ve kept this up for roughly 7 months.

I’m tired.

Really, really tired.

All this juggling, and jumping through hoops has been to give you, my dear users, the most amount of value for your buck.

And it’s going to get better!

For one, I’m going to start working on XP-Dev.com full time from mid-May. I’ve resigned from my full time job to take a break and hack on a number of things – XP-Dev.com is one of them.

There are a lot of improvements coming up in the pipeline. There’s a new project tracker which is going to be tightly integrated into the version control system. Git and Mercurial are coming up as well.

Along with these functional changes, the pricing plans will ultimately need to be changed as well. I’m not entirely sure whether they will be more expensive, or cheaper – but rest assured that at the point when pricing plans change, current Pro account users will always be given a better deal (well, I’ve just doubled your quota, haven’t I ?). Why ? Well, by upgrading your account, you are indirectly funding the development of XP-Dev.com, and the early adopters always come out on top.

If you do have any issues with the upgrades, please do give a shout in the forums or raise a support ticket. Some of the workflow for importing and exporting repositories have changed and I will be updating the wiki help documents in the next few days.

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