Recommended Rails Hosting

I get asked from time to time for recommendations on where to go for good rails hosting. There are tons of places out there. This is what i’m recommending at the moment. I’m sure in the future it’ll change.

If you’ve got too much money to spend on your VC funded startup and you don’t want to deal with anything go with Joyent. They are smart, use high end hardware, and charge high end prices. The only down side to joyent is that they use a Sun stack, so some standard rails / linux things don’t quite work out of the box.

Next if you have a few hundred dollars a month to spend, then i recommend Engine Yard. They really care about their customers, sponsor Rubinious development, and generally are great guys. By default you get one staging server and two production servers. It’s cool that they incorporate staging and the development cycle in to their hosting. If you get big, they will even built out a custom version of their whole setup for you to run yourself. I’d say the only downside to EY is that they’ve had some growing pains and a few down times as they worked the kinks out.

Some sites only need to scale for short periods of time. Icalico is an event scheduling social network app i work on with kellan. It gets no traffic, and is offline most of the time. But during conferences it gets a big spike in traffic. We use EC2 from amazon for icalico. It’s great, fast, and clean. We keep an image in S3 and pull it out when we need it. EC2 works out to costing $72 per month if you keep one server up and running 24/7. The really nice part is you can add more servers quickly and easily. The downside is if a box hard crashes you loose the file system changes since the last backup, and all the ip addresses are dynamic. We’ve never had a hard crash, but they do happen, and the ip addresses don’t change very often, again never happened to us.

On the cheap end, as cheap as i’d recommend to somebody, is Slicehost. They give you a bear bare vserver which you have to configure yourself. They put enough ram in them to be useful. I personally have a 512mg slice, but a small rails app is fine running at 256megs of ram. Some ‘other’ vserver hosters over slices with as little as 64 or 32 megs of ram. That’s crazy talk, nothing works in rails land with that little memory. Slicehost does ubuntu, which i like, and while i had to build out my hosting environment and install nginx, etc… it was worth it. I like them a lot. The only downside to slicehost on the low end is they are so popular there is a waiting list for accounts. They are smart and don’t overload boxes like some other hosters.

Things i don’t recommend. I tried Media Temple’s gridserver and didn’t like it. They charge more for less in comparison to slicehost, and they wrap you in a weird environment which makes debugging, deploying, and maintaining rails apps hard. I also recommend against a normal shared host like you’d get for a php app. Rails won’t run that way, it’s not worth trying.

What has worked for other people?

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Published:
September 10th 08:07 PM
Updated:
September 30th 08:50 PM
Sections:
Ruby and Rails