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I wonder where they used CouchDB and Cloudant for (listed at the bottom of the page).

I was intrigued by all the linked technologies, too. I've spent a day or so writing a site that I can't imagine being more than a few static pages, and it's just running on nginx on this VPS I bought.

I can understand monitoring for a site that -has- to be up (otherwise testing suites would start to break), but not the cloud database, let alone programmable markup or managed hosting (Heroku). Surely all that extra complexity is going to cost more in downtime than the time taken to set things up manually?

While we're honored to see that Cloudant plays a roll in the their app, I imagine the real answer to your question is the phrase "Experiment" at the bottom of the page. I imagine this is about learning/testing, not the most optimized way to skin the cat.

You're correct - it was all one big experiment so we threw way more technologies at it than we had to.

http://isitbeerti.me was another experiment of ours on the .NET platform

Heroku was a lot simpler than us spinning up (or paying for) a VPS. The other technologies were mostly just for fun.

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