Rails Hosting
Over the past week, I have been checking out my hosting options for a new Rails application that I’ll be putting into production soon. First I looked at the different hosting options available. From my research there seems to be two main options here - Shared hosting with Apache and FastCGI or a Virtual Private Server plan where you set up your own server.
Shared hosting with Apache and FastCGI seems to be a viable option for experimenting with RubyOnRails but I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable putting something into production on this kind of environment based on the comments and reviews I’ve seen of it. So that left the Virtual Private Server option.
I looked at all the major VPS players based in the US, as well as some of the Irish competition. In the end, it basically came down to a decision between Slicehost and RailsMachine. Both of these companies seem to get very good online reviews and are very competitive on price, especially when taking the weak dollar into consideration. RailsMachine seems to do a lot more for you in regards setting up your VPS for you with a full Rails stack, this is reflected in the price but still represents excellent value I’m sure. Inspite of this, I decided to go for the basic Slicehost plan. I want to take this chance to set up and configure my own VPS as I find that kind of thing to be useful in learning how things work and so don’t require the additional features of the RailsMachine hosting plan. I hope to use Deprec and Capistrano to automate the server setup and application deployment, if they both work as advertised it’ll make my life a hell of a lot easier.