CheapTweet Blog

Hi, Hayes here. I wear a lot of hats at CheapTweet and one of them is making sure all the behind the scenes code and servers work so that CheapTweet works well for you. I’m interrupting Jenn’s regularly scheduled blogging to bring you a quick note about a big change we made to CheapTweet last night.

You see, we’ve been growing at an awesome clip. Our traffic is 600% higher than it was at the start of the year and we’re pulling in more than 10,000 new deals from Twitter every single day. This is all great news and we want to say thank you to all of you out there for making it possible. The only problem was that we were getting too big for our servers.

Last night we fixed that. We moved our systems to a shiny new set of servers that can handle a ton more traffic. The great part is, you don’t have to do a thing. Just keep coming to CheapTweet.com to find the most unique social deals out there. But the best part is, now that we have all this new capacity we’re going to be adding new features at a much faster pace. Look for a bunch cool stuff coming out just in time for the holidays.

If you’re interested in a few of the technical details… read on. If not, you can safely get back to finding great deals.

Up until last night CheapTweet was hosted on a single large slice by the great guys over at Slicehost. This single-server architecture just wasn’t going to support our growth. After looking at our options, our team made the decision that the Rackspace Cloud Servers offered us the best performance for the price. We’re now running on a load-balanced, multi-server setup at Rackspace with a redundant database. This new infrastructure combined with the flexibility of Rackspace Cloud Servers allows us to easily add (or subtract) capacity as our site grows and we add new capabilities.

For those of you who might be interested in the tools we use behind the scenes at CheapTweet, I’ll give you a quick overview. CheapTweet is a Ruby on Rails application. We use BackgroundRB for background processing, beanstalkd for queuing, memcached (of course) and the fantastically fast Sphinx for text searches. We’re load balancing using nginx and HAproxy and we run the app using Passenger.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little technical digression. Thanks for using CheapTweet. We can’t wait to use this new infrastructure to build really cool new stuff for you.