But then you have to live in Indiana godforbid…. (sorry, could’t resist ‘-)

Anyway, sounds like you should go calling on the Chamber of Commerce as your next sponsor…

It’s one of those regions that’s small enough that there are very few degrees of separation between 2 companies or people. We’re trying hard to solidify these relationships and organize regionally as well.

It’s the perfect region to startup a tech company since the cost of living and tax benefits are so good. Compared nationally, it’s 20% less cost on average. That’s the word we need to get out! The MidWest attitude towards hard work and great service is a big difference as well.

Smaller Indiana is a new social network that has been started to better organize the businesses in the region.

PS: I’m glad Ade stepped in. We’re moving to Bluelock so I don’t have to know all the differences

P.S. You Indianians really do stick together, doncha?

@Douglas: Helping Indiana

I understand, I do the same in Atlanta, GA (see http://web.meetup.com/32/)

@Douglas: Amazon not an infrastructure service

Albeit not at the same level of BlueLock apparently, but it EC2 not infrastructure?

Bluelock is not paying for the post nor the sponsor spot. I provide some of my friends and colleagues with complimentary placement sometimes. Perhaps I should name it “Friends & Sponsors”.

Bluelock is also here in Indiana – you’ll see that I try to help out with Indiana startups and technology companies.

RE: Amazon:

Amazon’s service are not Infrastructure as a Service, they are Web Services. The difference is that my environment isn’t pulling from ‘a cloud’ (Amazon’s term) where my environment is shared with hundreds or thousands of others.

With Bluelock we will have dedicated servers, disk space, processors and bandwidth. We’re in a virtualized environment – so we can replicate our environment when needed.

We have guaranteed SLA’s, Industry Standard Security Compliance, firewalls, intrusion detection, console access, 24/7 monitoring and support, vaulted backups, redundant power… you name it.

Hope that helps! See Bluelock for additional information.
Doug

You couldn’t setup an Amazon cluster without a decent amount of technical knowledge, and would need to architect something to manage the different EC2 instances. You also run into a number of problems that would need to be handled in the application, like the fact that EC2 instances don’t have static IPs, that there’s no local storage on the EC2 instance, that S3 storage is much slower than SAN or local disk, and that SimpleDB doesn’t accept SQL queries or allow complex joins. EC2 and SimpleDB are still in beta right now (with the latter in private beta), so there’s no SLAs — not exactly something that you would want to hinge your production critical business on.

BlueLock basically gives you a drop-in replacement for a rack of Windows and/or Linux servers without the headaches of managing them, or re-engineering your application so it can be hosted at Amazon. You also get to talk to support engineers on the phone.

That said, Amazon is a lot less expensive to get started with, and BlueLock may not be cost effective if you’re only running a couple servers. It’s also pay-as-you-use, whereas BlueLock pricing is more like traditional data centers where you setup a plan to pay for a certain amount of cpu/disk/bandwidth/etc whether or not you use all of it each month.

Disclaimers: I know a few people that work at BlueLock. But I’m actively using Amazon S3 in production, am a big fan of EC2 (in the right cases), and am eagerly awaiting my SimpleDB private beta invite.