Featured App: DangDeal
Today we're featuring DangDeal built by Karthik Balasubramanian. Karthik is bootstrapping DangDeal.
What is DangDeal?
DangDeal is an auction site where a penny bid costs... wait for it - a PENNY! All the other penny auction sites sell bid packs and each penny bid costs around $.70, meaning that an item selling for $10 yields the site 1,000 bids or $700 - a lot to collect on a $50 gift card! On DangDeal users express interest by buying-in to the auction - then each bid costs only a penny.
DangDeal needed a stable, scalable platform to handle high volume of concurrent users - at a penny a bid we expect to get pounded! Our service is founded on integrity - a penny bid costs a penny. We rely on AppHarbor to back that integrity with performance and scale, allowing every bid to count.
Why did you choose AppHarbor?
For other applications, we have used Amazon EC2 with HAProxy/nginx and Azure. The original promise of EC2 (scale and cost) fell well short with a significant amount of our development time wasted on administration and deployment. Azure deployment has proven painful and we wanted to focus on development.
After reviewing AppHarbor it seemed a no-brainer. After a brief test we were sold and fully committed to AppHarbor. The ease with which you can deploy is amazing (and the way it should be!).
Which technologies is DangDeal built on?
DangDeal is built on ASP.NET Razor Web Pages, Chirpy Visual Studio Add In, MS SQL Server, Dapper.net, and Memcached on Memcacher.
How has AppHarbor worked for you so far?
On the technology side, it has been awesome. But the highlight is on the support (and human) side. We have had few queries and all of them were answered within few minutes. AppHarbor's terrific service compounds our savings by really limiting our operational commitments and allowing us to really focus on our product.
How often do you deploy new versions?
In our current phase, we deploy multiple times a day (why wouldn't you given how easy it is). We must be as responsive to our new users as AppHarbor has been to us and we know that the rapid improvement to DangDeal is critical to our success.
What did you like the best? Where could we improve?
Build and testing integration with version control has been around for a bit, but coupling it with deployment is innovative. At the risk of sounding redundant, the fanatic support has is what we like the best.
Suggestions for improvements:
- Automatic deployment as an option rather than the only way - We like this feature on Azure as well as on Google App Engine. On a new push, your code is sandbox'ed in a staging environment and you can choose when to deploy. This can be simulated on AppHarbor by having two applications and with some git magic, but it should be incorporated into the platform.
- Durability of the version control platform - There isn't much documentation around whether your git repo can be used as the primary remote repo. We are using unfuddle for remote repo and push to AppHarbor for deployment.
Anything else?
Other than thanking the AppHarbor team for putting out this fantastic product, we would love for readers to head over to www.dangdeal.com and try it out.
Thanks Karthik, for taking the time to answer our questions!
