Hi all,
Thank you for your comments, and I'm glad that you're mostly liking Beetight. I thought I'd come and try and answer a few of your concerns. I've answered some of these already to bigbearomaha on our support site, but they stand repeating and expanding here.
I understand very well the issues with trusting your data to an external host. If that's a problem in itself, then there's not a great deal I can do, but if there are specific reasons for the concern I can try to address them. All hosted web apps, from small ones like mine, through medium sized ones like 37signals, to giants like salesforce.com and google docs, have to reassure their users that their data is safe. Some of this might get technical.
Perhaps it's best I start by explaining our hosting infrastructure. We use Amazon Web Services for our whole setup. Beetight.com is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance, with the data on an external EBS volume. This means that hardware issues are removed from the equation. If the server catches fire, we just launch it right away in another location, using the external volume. This volume is snapshotted hourly via a cron job, so that is the most amount of data that could ever be lost. There are no recently graduated geeks at the hosting company to worry about. The only person with access to the server is me, and I know what I'm doing. I'm not going to pretend that we're not having any errors. We're still in beta, and I only launched the full version on Thursday. What I do hope I can reassure you is that these errors will be minor, quickly rectified, and won't result in loss of data.
I've some experience in doing this. Beetight is really a pet project of mine. My day job is running some very big web apps. I run clevr.com, which has over 40,000 users, with massive amounts of user data. In four years we've not lost a single piece of user data. I'm hosting Beetight on the same infrastructure.
I also run even more critical systems. We run hosted emergency planning systems and software for fire stations. We have several very large clients who rely on this, and can't tolerate even minutes of downtime. While this obviously isn't running on the same systems as Beetight, I hope this can reassure you that I'm not going to lose your data.
That said, however reliable a host, it's always more reassuring to have your own copies of the data. As bigbearomaha notes, you can currently download inspections as CSV files. I plan to extend this to all parts of the system, with an API to allow external client software to have access to the data.
In any case, thank you for your comments. All feedback is really welcomed, particularly as we're at such an early stage and need comments to help us improve. Do let me know if you have any other questions.