Online repair application reports success with hosting service

RepairPal brings transparency to $150 billion industry, link

After more than four months in production, RepairPal, an online resource for auto repair estimates, reports excellent uptime, scalability, and responsiveness from their Ruby on Rails-based application -- thanks to Engine Yard's deployment platform and hosting service.

In October 2007, RepairPal engaged with Engine Yard to help provide development guidance and staging for the company's June 2008 launch.

"In this industry, the vendors are saying that they'll be your outsourced hosting provider and systems administration team," says said David Esser, co-founder and CTO of RepairPal. "That's a very tall order and difficult to provide. Engine Yard delivered on this. They really are our outsourced systems administration team and hosting provider. It's great for me to be able to offload that to them, and they do a much better job at it than we ever could."

The site offers car service price estimates, user ratings and reviews for repair shops, reliability ratings and reviews for specific vehicle makes and models, free repair Q&A forums and an online system for managing and tracking all service on a vehicle. Since launch, RepairPal has had a number of big publicity hits that resulted in days of very high traffic spikes, but the company has yet to see server CPU go beyond 3 to 5 percent, the company states.

"RepairPal took a big leap of faith by building their business on Rails, and Engine Yard is pleased to help them move this application from concept to production," says Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard. "They've proven that Rails is more than ready for primetime and already powering a new generation of web applications."

For other companies considering Rails, Esser recommends that they consider partnering with a provider like Engine Yard: "It's a much more cost-effective solution. And because Rails can have some scalability challenges, it makes sense to host the solution with people who are really in the know as far how to make it scale."

For more details, visit www.engineyard.com/about/customers/repairpal.