
My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services - acangiano
http://antoniocangiano.com/the-best-ruby-on-rails-hosting-services/
======
retro
I wonder how many of these recommendations are sponsorship-based. Linode is
curiously missing in favor of Slicehost. Considering the recent discussion
here regarding changes to Slicehost's pricing options, this seems like either
a striking omission or an outright plug.

~~~
acangiano
Hi retro, I tried to include companies that I had some experience with or that
had been really recommended to me by people I trust. I use Slicehost for most
of my sites, and I'm very happy with them, and that's why I included them.
Some people say that Linode is just as good, or even better, but I haven't
tried them first hand for anything Rails related. I actually mentioned Linode
in the Slicehost paragraph, but didn't include them in the ordered list. Given
the many mentions and recommendations (including Peter's below) I edited the
post and included Linode along with Slicehost.

For full disclosure:

 _REFERRAL HOSTS_ (3):

HostGator

HostingRails

Slicehost

 _NON-REFERRAL HOSTS_ (6):

Linode

Brightbox

Rightscale

EngineYard

Mor.ph

Heroku

------
simon_kun
I can't speak highly enough about Brightbox (the managed VPS service Antonio
recommends).

Somehow they have managed to tread the fine line between a very comprehensive
and well configured service with great addons (Comprehensive management Gem,
load balancers, CDN and managed _very_ high performance Master-Master MySQL
cluster for all accounts) and flexibility (root access, install what you want
on the boxes, no need to re-learn "their way" of server management).

I'd like them to add PostgreSQL and US locations in the future, but for a
high-speed, reliable host they can't be beaten.

(A satisfied customer)

------
wgj
_> there are countless stories of people who have had their domain taken down
for “questionable reasons” by GoDaddy_

There's no comment section on the original post, but can the author or anyone
else provide links to specific and credible stories. Or at least elaborate on
what “questionable reasons”, e.g. DMCA?

~~~
acangiano
<http://nodaddy.com>

~~~
wgj
Thanks

------
EvilTrout
If you are going to go with an unmanaged host, I highly recommend buying your
own servers and looking into colocation. If you are going to bother installing
all the software yourself anyway, you'll get a much better price.

We were paying $800 a month for two high end servers at LayeredTech in Texas
to handle our rails site (about 2M pageviews/day) We then bought two
supermicro barebones servers and set up at a local co-location facility in
Toronto.

The upfront cost of buying the servers (which were better than the ones we
were renting) was $3500, but our monthly fees are now just $160. It didn't
take long to pay for the server cost, and we'll have them around for as long
as the hardware lasts (I expect it to be a while!).

------
retro
Anyone tried HostGator? I'm wondering what kind of Rails hosting you're
actually get for $5/month.

I'm using Dreamhost at the moment and my Rails app is _crawling_ and barely
usable.

Can't justify spending much on hosting at the moment, though, so HostGator
sounds interesting if they don't throttle your resources as aggressively as
Dreamhost seems to.

~~~
thinkbohemian
Never used hostGator, but hostmonster is way worse than dreamhost, fyi. In the
end I built my own setup using a Rackspace Cloud.

I've also used mor.ph (like heroku) and just really don't like the
restrictions that come by running on someone else's box and by their rules.
Building a server up from scratch is not for the faint of heart, but can be
very rewarding (and informative), not to mention cheap if you don't count your
own time.

~~~
acangiano
What's your monthly bill for Rackspace Cloud?

~~~
thinkbohemian
I have a 1Gb of ram running some hefty sites, as well as a dedicated mail
server. That comes out to $50, per month (roughly).

When i got everything set up i was only paying $10 per server per month.

~~~
acangiano
That's really cheap. I'm surprised.

------
javery
If you have something with a fairly simple architecture then I would stick
with Heroku or Slicehost, they are both very affordable.

If you need more flexibility I would go with EC2 (or EC2 through Engine Yards
Cloud stuff)

~~~
acangiano
I agree. For most people, Slicehost or Heroku are plenty (Slicehost being
cheaper, but less Rails focused). Another good name is Linode. I've read
somewhere, that people found them to be better, performance-wise, than
Slicehost.

~~~
petercooper
Linode is awesome. The CPU power you get is crazy compared to other providers
I've tried. They don't seem to overload their host boxes. I just ditched a
$250/mo dedicated server and got everything running on a $40/mo Linode with no
hassles.

------
whalesalad
I'd love to hear some comments here on equivalent Django/Python solutions. I
know of Webfaction and that's about it. I really want a Heroku for Django!

------
jagjit
Does anybody have experience with scaling their Rails application on Dreamhost
or Joyent? I have just started using Dreamhost VPSs with overall a good
experience but have not reached the point where I start looking into scaling
the app.

I see Linode and Heroku being recommended here a lot - will definitely explore
them too.

~~~
whalesalad
Dreamhost shared hosting is some of the worst in the business, they oversell
like crazy. Not sure how their VPS offering is, but in terms of price you will
pay much less for the same VPS (on paper) from Linode. I've had great
experiences with both Linode and Slicehost (using them almost equally for both
small sites and a startup (schoolrack.com is hosted on a 4 cluster Slicehost
setup). My vote is for Linode.

