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.
You should try Amazon EC2, (xen virtual machines)
very fast and not expensive.
Cheapest plans would cost $0.1/hour which is about 80 USD/month.
but you would have 1.7 GB ram and fast CPU, also you can backup to S3(no charge) plus a 160GB drive.
that virtual machines you could run 12 to 18 mongrels no problem…
Rails playground with 2 dedicated mongrels at 10USD/month is pretty damn good too…
Thanks for the comment Fred. I hadn’t thought of using EC2, it’s not a bad idea, though I don’t like the lack of persistance on the virtual machine itself and being forced to use S3 for any storage, I’m sure there is a bit of trickery required to get that working.
Having said that I must get myself an account and have a play around with EC2 and S3 to see what it can do.
Or maybe the third options - Litespeed with LSAPI. Cheaper, faster, RoR frendly. Have no personal experience with that hosting, but using Litespeed with success from years.
Amazon S3 and EC2 requires quite a bit of hack, until you get good at using it.
You use S3 for storing your Virtual machine. and anything you want. S3 is really cheap, and extremely reliable.
You have to keep backups of your machine and your data, because if the machine goes down, either you reboot, or shutdown, the data is lost.
it actually never went down on me. 4 months uptime.
and I do daily backups of mysql onto S3. and monthly of the whole machine(or after I do system updates),
I have some ruby scripts to do all above on my blog.
Good luck.
@Fred - sounds good I’ll check out those scripts you mention.
There’s a bit of hacking in relation to the dynamic IP address of the Virtual Machine as well by the looks of things - I know there’s a few companies selling solutions to this but I’d need to have a play around with all that before even thinking about using EC2 as a production environment.
@Stoyan - I didn’t come across too much information on Litespeed with LSAPI when I was doing my research, I must check it out when I have a spare half hour.