My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services | Hacker News Reader

My Recommendations for Ruby on Rails Hosting Services

antoniocangiano.com

22 pointsacangiano23 comments

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.

I know Antonio, no chances Linode is missing for something related to sponsorship. But indeed yes I think Linode is very worth to mention, as it works well and especially since Slicehost has not EU datacenters, while Linode provides UK datacenters. Really important if you want to deploy, for instance, for Italy.

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

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)

> 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?

http://nodaddy.com

Thanks

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!).

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.

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.

What's your monthly bill for Rackspace Cloud?

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.

That's really cheap. I'm surprised.

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)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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