After many months of eating and sleeping cloud computing, I’m pleased to announce that we’re ready!  Ready for what? Prime time?  No, not quite.  We’ve been working hard to refine our solution, work out the bugs, and add a little spit and polish to our user interface.  While I’m extremely pleased with what we’ve got, we need to take it to the next level of testing.  This is where YOU come in!

I’m happy to announce the launch of our public beta program.  Starting today, we welcome anyone to head over to the order page, sign up for an account, and start putting us through the paces.  The sign up process only takes a few minutes and provisioning your first cloud server is even shorter.

Questions:

Q:  Does it cost anything to join the beta program?
A:  No.  Customers will have the opportunity to try out the service absolutely free.

Q:  Will I be able to deploy real applications that are publicly accessible or is this some kind of internal test?
A:  This will all be live and publicly accessible.  While we encourage everyone to test out their websites and web applications and provide us with feedback regarding your experience, please do remember that this is a beta period and customers running their production environment do so at their own risk.

Q:  Will there be any limitations in the cloud during beta?
A:  There will not be any limitation on functionality, but there will be limitations on scale as there will be limited compute resources during the initial launch of the beta period.  Each customer will have access to provision up to 5 cloud servers.

Q:  How long do you anticipate the beta period will last?
A:  We are targeting a 1 month beta period and may extend or shorten it a week or two depending on the feedback we receive.

Q:  What will happen to my cloud servers and my data when the beta period ends?
A:  About 1 week prior to the end of the beta period we will be asking all customers to log into the ReliaCloud web portal and accept the new terms and conditions for launch.  Those customers that accept the new terms and conditions will smoothly transition out of beta and into full production with no further action needed and billing will then begin.  Those who do not accept the new terms and conditions will have their cloud servers and account removed from our system.

Q:  How do I send you feedback or report bugs?
A:  Please send any comments or feedback you have regarding your beta experience to betafeedback@reliacloud.com.

Q:  Why do you ask for a credit card to sign up for the beta if this is a free beta?
A:  In order to keep out those with nefarious intentions (can you say spammers?) we’re asking for a valid credit card to be provided.  Having this check and balance in place helps us to provide the best user experience for you.  Should you decide to stay on as client (which we hope you do) after the beta period has ended, standard charges will be billed to that credit card which you signed up with.

Thanks so much for your interest.  We look forward to hearing from you!

After eight months of hard work we have finally arrived at the beta launch of the ReliaCloud platform.  What started out as a simple conversation and whiteboard diagram is now reality due to a very talented group of developers, engineers, designers, support techs and marketers.  Who is ReliaCloud?  It’s the same people that make things tick at VISI, a privately held managed hosting and data center provider with more than 15 years of history.

When we started building ReliaCloud we focused on three core goals: reliability, elasticity, and affordability.

We wanted to build a cloud computing service that was more reliable than the commodity providers already in the market.  We didn’t want our customers to have to re-architect their solutions just to work reliably in the cloud.  And we knew customers needed enterprise-grade security and SAS70 certified data centers.

We wanted our customers to be able to scale from 10 servers to 100 servers – and back down again.  And we wanted them to have the option of doing this programmatically via an API.

Finally, we wanted to price our cloud services competitively.  Trying to figure out the cost of hosting in the cloud can be challenging.  So we tried to make our service pricing as transparent as possible.  What you get for the price is a slick web management portal, high availability, load balancing, 24×7 support, enterprise-grade security and a complete API.

Today is a day of rest but tomorrow we get back to work on a whole new set of features.  We look at this release of ReliaCloud as a “foundational release.”  It’s got all the basic features you would expect – and some advanced features you wouldn’t.  In a few weeks I’ll tell you more about our development roadmap.  I can’t wait to tell you what’s coming next!