

Ask HN: What is a good way to host a Rails app for free? Or very cheap? - benigeri

This is for a personal website.<p>Heroku's free tier sucks because servers take 5-10 seconds to spin up every time they are used. Amazon EC2 isn't working out for me either.<p>Any advice?
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padseeker
FREE:

appfog - <https://www.appfog.com/>

dotcloud - <http://dotcloud.com>

CHEAP:

webbynode, $15 entry level plan - <http://webbynode.com>

digital ocean, $5 entry level plan - <https://www.digitalocean.com/>

I've used appfog and it works alright. I am a paying customer for webbynode
and like it a lot. Easy to deploy, ssh access, flexibility. $15 might be more
than you want to pay, I've not tried digital ocean, but it seems like a nice
entry level price point.

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callmeed
I like Digital Ocean (use them for <http://bngal.com> and
<http://cheergram.com>) but be warned: I wasn't even able to compile nginx on
the $5 plan. Kept getting memory-related errors. YMMV

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hectormalot
<http://www.cloudvps.com/> A Dutch company that I've used for the last 18
months to run my VPS without issues. It also provides VPS's to the largest
online accounting software company here (Exact software) has reasonable
customer support

11 Euro (14 dollars) a month for: 1GB Ram, 20 GB HDD, 250 GB traffic and a
single core.

If you want even cheaper you could try hetzner.de with 8 euro/month, 512MB
VPS.

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caw
You could check out lowendbox for cheap VPS. I had one for a year, only paid
$50 for a 512MB Xen VPS. It ran a low volume rails site just fine. I did have
to do a trick with mysql, and that was to disable TCP in MySQL and only use
the local socket (/tmp/mysql.sock). That reduces the memory footprint of
mysqld significantly.

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bgdam
Linode. The 20USD/month plan is guaranteed to meet your needs, and their
service and support are top notch. The LISH shell is also really really useful
- esp. if you are new to sysadmin stuff, and has saved my ass a lot of times.
Their collection of tutorials on sysadmin stuff is another huge benefit.

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EdwardMSmith
When I had a rails app on Heroku (a while ago), I solved that by setting up a
free Pingdom account to ping a full stack (hit the DB, hit any external
services I was using) "heartbeat" route. I'm not sure if this works any more,
though - they may have done something to work around it.

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Donito
What's the problem with the 5-10 seconds wake up time in Heroku? This does NOT
happen every time they are used, it only happens ONCE every an hour or more of
inactivity. This limitation becomes problematic however if your app has cron
jobs every so often, or states (e.g. node app).

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benigeri
It's fine for developing but I want to have this as something I can send to
employers and friends. I don't want them to have to wait up to 10s to see a
site that I spend a lot of time trying to speed up lol

~~~
muellerwolfram
there is a way around that. just install the new relic addon, and configure it
to check your sites availability once every minute.(on a production site you
want that anyway to get alerts if the app is down, and might need a restart)

like Donito said, it only needs to wake up if there hasn't been a request in
over an hour -> which will never happen with the new relic addon, because it
sends a request every minute.

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reiz
Another solution is CloudControl: <https://www.cloudcontrol.com/for-
developers>. This is a provider from Berlin / Germany.

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gtmtg
OpenShift and AppFog are two PAASs I've used that both support Rails. Their
free tiers will be more than adequate for a personal website.

~~~
benigeri
I'm going to try those next, thanks.

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nXqd
Can i have a question why Amazon EC2 doesn't work for you ?

~~~
mikeevans
Might not be a technical issue, maybe his free tier ran out? After that, a
micro instance isn't really that cheap anymore.

~~~
benigeri
Yeah its a technical issue. I've been trying to set it up for the past couple
days with rubber, its not worked once.

~~~
nanijoe
Elastic Beanstalk now supports rails..use that, and you should be up and
running in a few hours.

[http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-
Ruby-...](http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-Ruby-
Applications-to-AWS-Elastic-Beanstalk-with-Git)

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swanson
Heroku with 3 unicorn workers + NewRelic uptime pings

~~~
1123581321
Pingdom or even a cronjob also works.

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bmelton
Dotcloud[1] is ideal for this sort of thing (to me). If it's a production app
and you're just looking for a free/cheap ride, you might need to look
elsewhere, but if the complaint is that the spinup time is too slow during
development, I would definitely look into Dotcloud, which lets you have
development instances free, and only production apps are charged.

~~~
benigeri
Might actually work for my site. I don't need a big or fast db as I will be
the only one using the rails interface. External users are just served non-
interactive pages.

