Cloud Developers

Note I cannot endorse the SocketLabs service anymore. Everything below works with any SMTP service. If you would like great alternatives please give the people at: Postmark a try for transaction email or if you need to send bulk email please try out SendGrid On my server I run the typical assortment of applications that is on any true developers servers. I have PHP for my blog, ASP.NET MVC for my side projects, and a couple scheduled tasks that include backups and other things. All of these applications and tasks have different places to configure their default SMTP relay, and it was really getting out of hand, but I had gotten use to changing them all when the need arose, and usually I just defaulted them to the IIS localhost, because it was easy. ...

I have been a huge fan of MySQL for a long time. It is the perfect database for when the budget is tight or you are not working in a Microsoft Environment. It performs well, and has a huge following of dedicated professional programmers that use it day in and day out on some of the largest websites on the planet. Most noteable Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Digg. Even with all these proven capabilities to scale and perform, Microsoft has choosen to ignore it and focus on some of the monolytic providers of databases such as IBM and Oracle when comparing SQL Server. ...