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Boxed Ice Blog
blog.boxedice.com · Company blog · on HN since 2009
Boxed Ice, the company behind Server Density, blogs about MongoDB in production, server monitoring, pricing and running a bootstrapped startup.
What HN saysHN commenters praise the founder's openly shared startup details and cite its MongoDB notes, though one criticizes its downplaying of durability tradeoffs.
19HN people shared it
10linked it in comments
41stories submitted
463story points
15 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Notes from a production MongoDB deployment3 people · 57 points · first shared 2010 · 12 comments on HN
- 2Taking payments online – merchant account & payment processor fees3 people · 54 points · first shared 2009 · 12 comments on HN
- 3Choosing a price for your webapp or startup using multivariate testing3 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 4Our holiday / vacation policy – unlimited with bonuses2 people · 57 points · first shared 2011 · 45 comments on HN
- 5Implementing Startup Metrics for Pirates using Mixpanel – Part 1: Features2 people · 36 points · first shared 2009 · 3 comments on HN
- 6Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB2 people · 21 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 7Queueing MongoDB using MongoDB2 people · 6 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 8MongoDB Monitoring Dashboard2 people · 5 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 9UPS delivers at 11.22MB/s2 people · 4 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 10Why we moved away from “the cloud” to a “real” server1 people · 72 points · first shared 2009 · 43 comments on HN
- 11Automating partitioning, sharding and failover with MongoDB1 people · 37 points · first shared 2010 · 8 comments on HN
- 12Barclays hates tech startups1 people · 27 points · first shared 2009 · 4 comments on HN
- 13How to improve your website load time1 people · 26 points · first shared 2009 · 7 comments on HN
- 14Map reduce and MongoDB1 people · 11 points · first shared 2010 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Replacing RabbitMQ with MongoDB1 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
techiferous · 2010-04-21
ServerDensity is another tool that's good at notifying you if something is amiss on your server: http://www.serverdensity.com/
As a bonus, the creator of ServerDensity has a great blog that shares details of his entrepreneurial bootstrapping endeavor: http://blog.boxedice.com/
nodejscloud · 2011-02-16
Looks great! We use and love ServerDensity (http://www.serverdensity.com). They just released an amazing looking MongoDB monitoring plugin as well (http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/02/15/mongodb-monitoring-dashboard/). Any idea what your pricing will be?
rdtsc · 2011-11-01
You just don't know about the other side of the coin -- no durability to start with. You'll be flying fast, until one day you realize your data is corrupted.
Not saying it is bad thing to optimize for speed, it is just a bit dishonest to downplay the negative effects especially after calling a product a DATA-base.
http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/392868405/mongodb-durability-a-tradeof…
http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-mongodb-de…
mattm · 2011-09-10
I applied recently to Server Density (but was rejected). What attracted me was their job description offering "unlimited" vacation. But you actually get a bonus if you take more than 5 weeks. I thought that was a good way to make sure people actually use their vacation time.
http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/08/19/our-holiday-vacation-policy-unlimi…
tow21 · 2011-09-01
With all due respect and without being snarky, your steps are wrong. Try these ones:
1. Register a business (Ltd, LLC, etc)
2. Open a Business Bank Account
3. Implement Paypal to get yourself up and running,
4. Prove that there's a market for your product, people will pay for it, people will continue to pay for it, you don't have lots of chargebacks, you're capable of managing sensible customer relations, and generally are as small a risk as possible for any merchant account. As a bonus, this also validates your business plan before you invest too much time in irrelevant admin.
5. Go and talk to your bank. And every other bank out there. Shop around, shop around, shop around.
(As an aside, read David Mytton's blog: http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/05/20/taking-payments-online-merchant-ac… )
6. Profit!
EDIT: fixed formatting
stingraycharles · 2010-06-16
Maybe this is something that interests you: http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-mongodb-de…
niravs · 2010-03-29
There was an interesting article on HN recently: http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/03/07/choosing-a-price-for-your-webapp-o…
Might be of relevance to you.
dmytton · 2010-03-01
I've commented on this here: http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production-mongodb-de…
Essentially this decision was due to the disk space requirements because of the way MongoDB allocates files for each DB.
There are no performance tradeoffs for using lots of collections. See http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Using+a+Large+Number+of+Collection…
swombat · 2010-01-25
A couple of articles that might help you:
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0006-how-to-get-a-merchant-account.html
http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/05/20/taking-payments-online-merchant-ac…
bhousel · 2009-09-09
You have some catching up to do... :)
They are not at all concerned about normal form or joins - it's just not that kind of a database.
Here are some good blog posts that elaborate on the current non-RDBMS fad:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/02/is-the-relational-datab…
http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distributed-key-v…
http://randomfoo.net/2009/04/20/some-notes-on-distributed-key-stores
http://bcbio.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/evaluating-key-value-and-documen…
http://blog.boxedice.com/2009/07/25/choosing-a-non-relational-database…