Where We Are

Coolspotters, our flagship product, was built using Ruby on Rails and runs on Phusion Passenger application servers. Traffic is balanced using HAProxy. We use MySQL for storing all spot, profile, comment, and user data; everything except images. To increase performance and reduce load on our databases, we aggressively cache our data using Memcached. About 50% of Coolspotters activity hits cache. All searches, including site search and form auto-completes, are run against a Solr search server.

All Coolspotters servers are hosted on Amazon’s EC2 service. This allows us to scale quickly and perform reliably while keeping our costs down. All MySQL data is stored using Amazon’s EBS which provides snapshots several times a day. So should anything bad happen, we can restore our database quickly. I mentioned above that all data except images was stored in MySQL. For images, we use S3 for storage and Amazon’s CloudFront for delivery from several locations around the globe. All of our Amazon services are configured, deployed, and managed using RightScale.

Future Plans

We’re always trying to create a better experience for our users. This involves careful analysis of our infrastructure, identifying areas that need improvement, creating solutions, and then executing. One area we’ve identified as needing improvement is search. The indexing time of our current solution, Solr, isn’t optimal. Since search is tied into so many aspects of Coolspotters, we know we need to improve this to get the user experience we want. We’ve been experimenting with Sphinx as a replacement and have been pleased with the results so far.

Another area we are looking to optimize is image encoding, storage and delivery. Currently, most of the media uploaded to Coolspotters are images, so any improvement we make to speed up encoding and rendering time has a great impact on the entire site.

We’re looking forward to sharing more about the technical aspects of our products and what goes on behind the scenes here at Fanzter.

-Jon

Recently though, we took a breather to appreciate an incredible honor presented to us by the editors at PC Magazine, who named Coolspotters as one of their “Top 100 Websites of 2009“.  

We greatly appreciate being considered, but we promise not to slow down! Keep an eye out for some exciting releases and developments coming this fall! Thanks again for the award, PC Mag, and a huge ‘thank you’ to the incredible community of users we have on Coolspotters!

-Eric

We’re excited to announce today that Fanzter has acquired Mustache, Inc., a Richmond, VA-based software development company. Mustache’s founder, Jon Maddox, will be joining Fanzter full-time and will lead technology and product development for the company. When we started Fanzter, we committed ourselves to hiring only the best people, launching the best products, and partnering with only the best companies. Our acquisition of Mustache is consistent with this theme and, in Jon, we are excited about the opportunity to add a brilliant entrepreneur and product-builder to our team.

Mustache has created several popular iPhone applications such as Summizer, Streaks, and Brackets. If you’ve ever tried any of these apps, then you know how elegant and useful they are. We’re proud to add these products to our growing portfolio.

This acquisition gives us an incredibly well-rounded product suite – a family of applications that are informational, entertaining, and a little bit addictive (we hope). It definitely takes Fanzter to a new level of excellence, and we’re looking forward to what’s next. We can guarantee it won’t be boring.

-Aaron

Inkd is a buy and sell marketplace for printed materials (brochures, business cards, flyers, envelopes, etc.) where business owners can choose from original templates made by professional designers. It’s an awesome service and definitely worth checking out.

Enjoy!

-Aaron

Hop on over to Newsweek and check it out.

-Aaron

If you’re interested, here’s the official press release about the partnership.

Today I’m excited to announce that Fanzter, Inc. recently closed an investment round with our friends and new partners at Steamboat Ventures. Steamboat is a top-tier venture firm, and we believe their expertise and approach to growth can help us develop great, new entertainment properties. Dan Beldy will be joining our board of directors, bringing incredible experience as both an investor and entrepreneur.

Coolspotters‘ growth over the last year has been amazing. To date, our growth has been entirely viral with no money spent on marketing or PR. And the product was developed by a relatively small team.

With this new partnership and funding, we are in a very strong position to accelerate the growth of Coolspotters, continue enhancing and extending the product, and begin building new, next-gen products. Apart from those items, we plan on staying lean and focused.

Over the next year, you can expect to see some exciting developments from Fanzter, Inc. as we try to capture the world of opportunity ahead of us. Stay tuned.

Thanks for being with us on this adventure and we continue to appreciate all of your support.

-Aaron

If you’re interested, here’s the official press release about our Series B funding.

We still need your support. The final round of voting starts today and ends on December 14th, at midnight. You can help us by voting for Coolspotters at Mashable.com (and if you really like us, you can vote more than once each day until the 14th).

Thanks again. We hope you have a joyous holiday season!!

-Aaron

We’re very proud to announce our first Coolspotters Holiday Gift Guide. Featuring our most popular product categories, the Guide offers our top individual product selections for 2008. There’s a reason our final picks are popular with not only celebrities and public figures, but with the entire Coolspotters community. Very simply, we believe they’re the best. So check it out and see for yourself! The Coolspotters Gift Guide has arrived!

Happy Thanksgiving,
Eric

The final round of voting starts now and ends on midnight November 30th. We would love to have your support. You can help us by voting for Coolspotters at Mashable.com.

Wish us luck!!

Aaron

Aaron LaBerge
CEO, Fanzter
aaron@fanzter.com