We’ve just received approval from Twitter for our 20,000 Twitter API calls per hour! Isn’t that great?

Some updates were made to Foller.me last night, you can view those at the semi-public beta over here: beta.foller.me – recent queries are now working, completely changed the stopwords removal algorithm (works much faster) and changed the linking structure. You can see now that the tags in the recent @mentions section link to their profiles on Foller.me. The tag cloud builder was also optimized, people with few tweets now look not worse than @cnn ;)

Also, I’ve finally managed to get a grid-service hosting account from Media Temple. Moved the blog and the beta over to the new place this morning and everything seems to work just great! They’ve got a well-structured control panel by the way, I really loved it.

The Firefox and IE search plugins are done and work fine, though we’re not releasing those public before the actual public beta release of Foller.me (domain conflicts). The release date of the first public beta is set to be 1st of June. Hope we do not overdue :)

Thanks for all your support everyone and keep your suggestions coming!

The beta has been fine. The design is almost ready. The blog theme is under development (I like this white one meanwhile). Now, the hosting. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I have no idea what I need and I can’t even imagine how much people will visit the website every day. It maybe 10, it may be 100,000. Anybody good at start-up calculation? ;)

It’s currently hosted in Moscow, Russia, but that’s definitely NOT the way it should be. Twitter API calls from Russia to CA, USA takes quite some time, that’s why I was thinking about hosting somewhere in California. Maybe not California, but it HAS to be US for sure! I looked at various hosting plans, shared, VPS, and dedicated servers, there are loads of companies that suit my needs. But I’m worried about pricing. Not sure I’d want to spend a bunch of money on dedicated hosting if we’ll have 10 visits per day for the first few weeks.

So, the final part is that I’m looking for some hosting company that would sponsor the foller.me project in exchange for advertising opportunities on foller.me ;) I know that this doesn’t sound right, but there SHOULD be one ready to help. Any ideas?