Jason McCay is a Developer and one of the Founding Members of CommonThread, an Internet consultancy focusing on Web applications development. McCay and CommonThread will be giving a talk at MongoSF about hosted database platforms, specifically, their hosted MongoDB platform called MongoHQ.

At MongoSF, McCay will revealsome insights into hosting a database as a platform, the advantages over using a pre-configured database service such as MongoHQ over self-configured such as EC2, and a sneak peak into the product development efforts of MongoHQ and a workshop for using MongoDB and MongoHQ at MongoSF. McCay reveals a preview to those insights here:

Q: How did MongoHQ start?

Jason McCay: Our company, CommonThread, created MongoHQ. Simply…we are a group of guys that came together a few years ago to create a remarkable company focused on web applications written in Ruby on Rails.

As with Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework, we found MongoDB a while back and fell in in love with it. After seeing the effort required in not only creating a MongoDB database, but managing it, and seeing some of the market movement towards distributed computing, we thought it would be great to offer a service to help developers find that using MongoDB is a no-brainer. Our goal was to reduce the barrier to entry.

Q: How does MongoHQ work?

Jason McCay: We allow a user to create an account on MongoHQ and from there, they can create MongoDB instances as they have need and then make those instances available to their applications. MongoHQ provides a web interface to manage the creation of instances as well as to manage the individual databases, their content, run queries, etc.

We also provide a nice interface into GridFS.

Q: Does MongoHQ integrate with Amazon EC2 or CloudServers?

Jason McCay: Currently, we have chosen Amazon EC2, as we feel strongly that EC2 is the fastest and most reliable cloud platform available. As for future expansion onto different platforms, we continue to evaluate our plans for growth and utilization of additional platforms is certainly something we are considering.

Q: What is the advantage of using MongoHQ versus an individual deploying MongoDB on their own EC2 instance?

Jason McCay: The clearest advantage is cost. For example, to start up a 64-bit instance of MongoDB on AWS would cost upwards of $300 per month. You can get it through MongoHQ for $49 per month.  For that $49 per month, we manage your instances, keep you updated with the latest versions of the software, provide a web-based interface to explore your instances, handle your data backups, etc. Plus, customer will have access to new features that we will be making available soon.

Q: Do you run your own custom distribution of MongoDB?

Jason McCay: Right now, we don’t. We run the latest stable version that 10gen has released…which is 1.4. We do have some plans to release some open-source projects for MongoDB connectivity in the future, but those are still in development.