Choosing a host (Page 2 of 2)

there are some free hosts that offer PHP and RoR. For example http://www.110mb.com/ has a good one db plan. It may not be ideal but when your getting free hosting who can complain.

Its good if you just want to get one app online that you have been working on but cant afford hosting.

I use bluehost and I would recommend them. They are currently upgrading all their server. They have rails but no extra gems and you need to fax ur DL to get SSH. You can install subversion yourself (only as a client, not recommended as a server). Once u install subversion you can do rake rails:freeze edge.

They are quite cheap and have FCGI and all the essential things you need. They arent just "rails" which is a good thing. Most rails only sites only give you rails and nothing else and charge u a buttload of money. Like you were saying that their "introductory" plan is $5. Bluehost's standard shared plan (which is the only plan they offer) is quite good and only 1 buck more. They have a good "setting up Rails" article in the kb which you should read before starting.

They are also listed here: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsWebHosts

Last edited by aceofspades (2006-12-19 19:29:59)

I just want to put my two cents in and say I've been very happy with railsplayground.com. Excellent customer service. I was having some trouble with capistrano and SSH on their standard plan so they just immediately and without hesitation upped me to their guru plan.

Granted, upping me to guru was probably less headache than dealing with my problem But still, I've been very happy with them.

Late to the party I am but boy, Site5 has been a dud for me. I have been trying to reach sales to ask some questions before signing up for their $5/month deal but nada, never heard back from them since I left my phone number last week plus a follow up email yesterday. If this is the way they treat customer lbefore I sign up, I shudder to think what the service is like after I sign up. Also, Site5 is stuck in MySQL 4.x land with no clear timeline for migrating to MySQL 5, that's one of my major concern with Site5 and now the lack of response.

Oh well, I am leaning towards Dreamhost now, will see how they respond.

Last edited by bngu (2007-04-03 22:47:57)

+1 vote for Slicehost.

If you are not scared to get your hands dirty with Sysadmin stuff, that is. They offer great prices, decent speed and helpful folks on their IRC channel

While its theoretically possible to have multiple Rails sites on a shared host, I wouldn't want to try it. IMO, hosting one small Rails site on a shared host account is about as much as it can handle. The problem is a shared host doesn't have enough resources to spare which Rails requires - particularly memory. And the more Rails sites you have, the more memory it will take up.

You could either go with VPS, or just make a new shared account for each site. I prefer VPS.

As for Slicehost, I think the lowest bracket can handle 3 mongrel instances without a problem, so you could have 3 small rails sites on there without too much hassle. If one site gets too busy you could upgrade to the next plan and add a mongrel cluster to handle the load.

This is most of what you need:
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/mongrel_cluster.html

Slightly off topic, but how does one get more comfortable with setting up and managing something like the slicehost accounts you speak of?
I know the answer always revolves around practice - but where do I head? What is the right direction so that I am not wasting my time and energy in the wrong directions(s)?

Based on subsequent raves about Slicehost, I am now looking at it seriously. I know that they have recently deployed FC6, just wondering if anyone has written up instructions on getting it setup with all the usual suspects, Rails, Ruby, SVN, MySQL, etc. I found a good article on Ubuntu setup though, hoping I can find one on FC6. Thanks.

P/S: There is currently a 21 days waiting period for 256MB slice.

Last edited by bngu (2007-04-05 14:14:15)