In a bid to outflank competitor Heroku, Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based provider of hosting and support for Web applications written in the Ruby on Rails language, rolled out a new free trial program for its AppCloud service this week. In a blog post, the company said new customers can run their Ruby applications for up to 500 compute-hours at no cost. Heroku, owned by SalesForce.com, also offers a zero-cost option for new customers using small amounts of database storage, but Engine Yard says its free offering covers production-level service. “We aren’t giving you 500 hours of underpowered toy compute power,” Engine Yard’s Nic Williams wrote in the blog post. “We want you to test-drive AppCloud with the same configuration that many of our customers use for their production applications.” Xconomy profiled Engine Yard in January.
Author: Wade Roush
Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco.
Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.)
I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia.
I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats.
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