We've been hosting our own sites and those of many of our clients since we started the company in 2009. But on January 3rd, we announced we were going to open that up for other Django developers.
Since then, we've had over 1,000 people sign up to be in the private beta for Gondor. We've been sending out surveys to those people to better understand their needs and the response has been very encouraging. Over 60% of people on the waiting list have responded to the survey so we're getting a good sense for what people are looking for in a deployment and hosting solution.
Following a Tolkien analogy (as we so often do at Eldarion—even the January 3rd announcement date was intentional) we refer to different hosting market segments with reference to hobbit holes, Rivendell and Barad-dûr. Think of hobbit hole hosting as your $10-$50 / month solution for low-traffic sites or hobbyist projects. Rivendell hosting is your dedicated production stack starting around the $500 / month price point with a separate database server and possibly worker, cache, search, etc. And then at the high end, you have your Barad-dûr hosting with clusters of app servers, database replication, fail-over, etc.
For the last two years, we've mostly focused on Rivendell-type deployments for our own sites and our client sites. Much of our work on Gondor the last couple of months has been making it more self-service, both for our own developers to quickly deploy branches for testing or demonstration, and for our clients (especially when they have their own development teams) to take control of their deployments into staging and production. This work will bring a hobbit hole hosting offering to Gondor as well.
We're still in limited beta on the new self-service features but if you're looking for a white-glove managed hosting solution in the $500 / month ballpark, you should contact [[mailto:gondor@eldarion.com|gondor@eldarion.com]] now as we're making that service available beyond our own development clients.
If you're not ready for Rivendell level hosting today, you can still join the waiting list at [[http://gondor.io|gondor.io]] as we're letting in more beta testers this month.
We have some other exciting announcements coming soon, so stay tuned. And look for us at [[http://us.pycon.org|PyCon 2011]] in Atlanta next week.