
What webhost do you use for your startup? - rami

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madmotive
I recommend <http://www.slicehost.com/> I was blown away by the simplicity and
power of their service. All the benefits of your own box with far less hassle
and only $20pm starting fee. Loads of really good documentation on getting a
production RoR environment up and running too. They're probably the best bet
for bootstrapers and students.

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abahgat
We use slicehost too for our web app. Even if most of their customers appear
to use RoR, we didn't have any issue in setting up Apache and MySql and
getting our Java/Tomcat/Struts/Hibernate web application up & running even on
a VPS with 256MB of Ram.

~~~
jamongkad
Checked out the rest and Slicehost seems to appeal to me the most. I love
their pricing plan! very simple and straight forward. Though how do they
compare to RailsMachine etc. in terms of scaling Rails apps?

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semigeek
<http://www.webair.com/> \- I've got a few servers with them, great service
and prices. I can get you custom prices that aren't listed on the site; for
example I've got a quad xeon 3ghz with dual SCSI 120gb drives, 4gb ram and
10mbps unmetered for 249/month.

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jmw
I'd definitely recommend <http://rimuhosting.com>

I know of at least 1 YComb startup that has used it in the past - and we're
using it now. I've personally been hosting with them for 2 or 3 years now and
it's hands down the best virtual hosting I've used (compared with 4 others
I've tried).

Other friends are using Amazon EC2+S3 for scaling needs (on the fly load-
balancing). Haven't used it myself, but I only hear great things.

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mgiles
I'd second that vote for Rimu. I used them when I started Furl and I continue
to use them for my new projects. They are truly fantastic when it comes to
support.

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melhorn
we use joyent.com - at least we try to... The portfolio is impressive, and we
mainly chose them because they offer horizontally scalable rails solutions,
something that many providers are still missing.

We requested the new server 2 weeks before. Still no server...

Do you know of alternatives we might be looking for?

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melhorn
Well, it turned out their mails got caught in the spam filter and we managed
to overlook them :-( What a shame...

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inklesspen
I like Linode: <http://www.linode.com>

They may be a little more expensive than other VPS hosts, but they make up for
it with awesome, rapid service turnaround. I've been using them for three
years, and I don't think I'd switch to anything except maybe EC2.

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juwo
Geoff Brozny at <http://www.glorb.com> He is fantastic at customer support.
Send him an email anytime and he will respond within an hour - usually, within
a few minutes.

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robertgaal
I'd recommend Railsmachine. I wrote a post about it here:
<http://blog.wakoopa.com/archives/how-we-got-hosted-the-rails-way>

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keven
for projects written using Rails, i would suggest engine yard or railsmachine

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zaidf
Softlayer

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theoutlander
As recommended by iJigg....Softlayer ... and they are just beautiful!!!

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zaidf
Dude these guys should gift me free servers. I've referred at least a dozen
people to them since our launch. Until their great service continues I won't
complain.

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gibsonf1
We're trying to decide whether or not to set up a box at our place for our
initial launch or to use a remote host. Looking at softlayer prices, it looks
like things can add up pretty quickly. What is your experience with the costs
- does it make sense given the low expense of boxes and bandwidth? Do they
have a good scaling up path?

~~~
zaidf
We have two boxes with them. We've few ideas about scaling. I am personally of
the view that when we have a scaling problem, we'll address it without
worrying too much about it beforehand. It can easily bog down your startup in
calculations that will likely mean very little when you do actually have a
scaling problem. Having a rough idea in your mind is a good idea IMO.

I believe this is the advice that delicious founder gave too in his writeup.

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jmtame
For simplicity and affordability, you can't go wrong with GoDaddy.

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pistoriusp
Really?

<http://nodaddy.com/>

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nostrademons
We're also on GoDaddy, and haven't had any problems so far (granted, we're
pre-launch, so we haven't had a chance for any of the really taxing stuff to
occur). We haven't ruled out switching services if there's a problem, but we
might as well start simple.

You have to take into account company size when weighing complaints. The
bigger hosting providers - GoDaddy and DreamHost - will necessarily have more
negative opinions, simply because of sheer numbers. But there are many, many
satisfied customers of them.

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ivan
site5

