It’s time to thank RubyLearning’s excellent sponsor – Locaweb.¹

Locaweb is Growing real Fast!

Locaweb is the biggest web hosting company in Brazil and is heading to become the largest in South America by a big margin. They are about to release their brand new Cloud Computing platform, from an investment of around USD 1.5 million. This should help to lower the barrier of entry for any business – small and large – in need for more than shared hosting space. Your business will be managed in a very dynamic environment ensuring high availability, performance and low costs.

Growing at a rate of 40% a year, Locaweb also announced the acquisition of a new Data Center. It has 28 square meters and a capacity to have 100 thousand servers. Operations in the new Data Center will begin in 2009 and the old Data Center will become a backup center to further ensure high availability.

And the company is heavily investing in new and innovative technologies. Last month they released the official support for Ruby on Rails in all their Linux based shared hosting plans. Not only that, they further improved the support for PHP and also Python with WSGI based frameworks such as Django and Pylons.

Next month South America will have its first big Ruby on Rails event, the Rails Summit Latin America, which will happen on October 15th to 16th in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Locaweb invites everybody to participate, help promote it and make Rails really viable in the South American market. Several international well known Railers such as Chad Fowler, Charles Nutter, Obie Fernandez and others will be here to celebrate Ruby and Rails.

As a side note, Fabio Akita, Locaweb’s Linux Product Manager, released a small open source project called Locarails, a command line tool that leverages Capistrano to amateur programmers. Capistrano is a well known deployment automation tool written in Ruby by Jamis Buck, from the Rails Core Team. Locarails helps you to easily configure Capistrano for your projects, ensuring trivial deployment from the developer’s local workstation to Locaweb’s remote hosting account, just a ‘cap deploy’ away.