

Ask HN: Hosting a Ruby on Rails app - perucoder

I'm thinking about going with Ruby on Rails for an app I'm building and was wondering what people's experiences were as far as hosting. I don't have the money for dedicated servers so I'll be going with a shared plan.<p>Has anybody had any regrets after going this route?<p>I've read that Rails doesn't perform so well in these types of environments. Is it something to worry about when I'm still small or only if my app becomes very popular?<p>I saw HostingRails.com had a special offer for their Stacked plan. Has anybody used them and can provide feedback?
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tomfakes
I'd go with Heroku to start. Its free to start, but does jump quickly to
$36/month, and you can decide at that time where you want to take it - more
Heroku, VPS, dedicated etc.

I haven't used Heroku, but then I haven't deployed a 'small' rails app since
before Heroku started.

Edit: Also, make sure you're using Ruby 1.9.x - this alone will give you a
bunch of extra performance to allow you to run more users on the same
configuration at the low end

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dacort
Whenever I have a Rails app that I'm not sure where it will go or how much
effort I want to put into it, I deploy it on Heroku.

It's dead simple, just runs (most of the time), and is zero cost until it
starts getting substantial traffic.

~~~
perucoder
What do you consider substantial traffic?

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jamesbritt
Find some place that offers Passenger Phusion. Makes hosting a breeze.

Also, if hosting/scaling becomes an issue, you might look at running your app
under JRuby and hosting it using a Java app server. There's some overhead in
learning about configuration, and such, but it can solve certain problems.

I've been using Railsplayground as a staging server, and while it works OK
(though there's near zero load on it) I had stuff break because they decided
to upgrade from Ruby 1.8.6 to 1.8.7. Plus, there's no `screen`, for example,
which makes things a little harder than they need be.

Not being root means you have to live with other people's decisions.

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karlrossmann
dream host is good for about 10 visitors, after that you'll have to go to a
VPS. I like rimuhosting- outstanding service for about $30/month. You get
access to a virtual server, not a web interface, so you get a root account
with a terminal.

