+1 www.slicehost.com, they totally rock.
Please, take my word for it, don’t use Gentoo as a production server, I’ve heard horrid stories about it. I’d recommend Ubuntu (my personal favorite) or CentOS (which is used on most hosting environments, but I don’t like the way the OS is going forward, and if you google around, I’m not the only one).
Choosing the best VPS depends on a few things, but here we go:
• Bytemark.co.uk: very good VPS, but only use them if you’re a good linux sysadmin or have someone who is able to decently set up your server for you. Most people I know on Bytemark use it for Java apps.
• Rimuhosting: my personal favorite, a bit more expensive, but their excellent support just makes up for the extra few dollars spent, their servers just kick ass. If you put “Please install the Rails stack” when you register, they’ll set up your server with everything needed to deploy your applications with ease. If you’re not too confident about configuring your server, their support is just great: each time I asked them something (and I’m fairly good at administrating a linux server myself, so my questions were quite technical), they sent me a mail containing the exact procedure with very accurate information and a message that they already did my work for me.
• Railsmachine: I’ve heard great things about them (and considering the server admins are quite active on the list and the rails community, they’ll figure out the most efficient way of deploying for you).
This said, there’s been an active discussion on the topic over the last few weeks, so if you search the forums, you’ll find hundreds of similar questions and very similar answers too 
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
Please, take my word for it, don't use Gentoo as a production server, I've heard horrid stories about it. I'd recommend Ubuntu (my personal favorite) or CentOS (which is used on most hosting environments, but I don't like the way the OS is going forward, and if you google around, I'm not the only one).
Sorry to push in. What have you heard about Gentoo? Just wondered as
I'm a Gentoo user who's currently trying to choose between Gentoo and
Ubuntu for a VPS 
Cheers, Jord
nick wrote the following on 26.02.2007 12:07 :
hi, i'm choosing gentoo as distros, do you suggest a good vps, with maybe a compiling farm ? (i saw something time ago, but they had only 80 mb ram)
Linode is OK for me. They are hosting my Gentoo server for 2 years now and I had very few problems (some electrical and network outages one year ago). The people there are highly technical and this makes for a really good client support.
I'm using the smallest server they propose: 128 MB, 4GB and 50GB/month and I'm happy with it (at the beginning it was only a 64MB, 3GB and 25GB/month, but they upgrade the old accounts when they update their pricing which is quite nice).
Expect longer compile times (gcc and glibc take their time) and pay attention to the space available in /var/tmp/portage for these long compilations.
I've not yet installed a Rails application on it (in fact the only application I could put on it is an evil beast with hundreds of thousands of rows in the database so I'm cautious).
Lionel
The main concern the people I talked with concerning Gentoo is related to the Gentoo philosophy of updating as much as possible.
In fact, Gentoo doesn’t have stable releases, as everything is centered around fast, incremental updates. Gentoo encourages you to update as much as possible (it’s all over their documentation) and when updating the system, a profile update will try to replace your system. A profile update will mess around with your configuration files and even alter them, which means a reboot can lead to your server just being offline for hours because the update has broken your setup. If you add to that the time it usually takes to get your Gentoo server completely set up the way you want it and you’ll have to go through all these time-consuming steps over and over again, it’s just not a very effective system for servers, but it’s a great system for people who like to play around with just about everything there is in Linux.
My Ubuntu experience has been: install it, configure it in a few hours and then just install the security updates as they come along. And if I update, I do it with peace of mind that everything will keep on running as smooth as a baby’s bottom
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
Ok, thanks. I'm leaning towards Ubuntu
Peter De Berdt wrote the following on 26.02.2007 15:37 :
Sorry to push in. What have you heard about Gentoo? Just wondered as
I'm a Gentoo user who's currently trying to choose between Gentoo and
Ubuntu for a VPS
The main concern the people I talked with concerning Gentoo is related to the Gentoo philosophy of updating as much as possible.
?! Why is it that I have several production servers on which I only applied security updates for anywhere between 8 and 18 months? What you call "Gentoo philosophy" is probably "a subset of Gentoo's users philosophy". Some seem to think that only because they can update they must.
In fact, Gentoo doesn't have stable releases, as everything is centered around fast, incremental updates. Gentoo encourages you to update as much as possible (it's all over their documentation)
Where exactly? I'm not reading Gentoo manuals each evening, but for 2 years I seem to have missed these encouragements...
and when updating the system, a profile update will try to replace your system. A profile update will mess around with your configuration files and even alter them, which means a reboot can lead to your server just being offline for hours because the update has broken your setup.
1/ a profile update is not automatic, you have to choose to update your profile (you can only be reminded that your profile is going to become obsolete). From past experience, a profile is supported for at least one year and a new one appears each 6 months. 2/ configuration files are next to never updated without the admin's intervention which is helped in doing so by merging utilities like dispatch-conf. For baselayout config files, old config formats are usually supported by new versions of init scripts in order to avoid problems with early reboots.
If you add to that the time it usually takes to get your Gentoo server completely set up the way you want it and you'll have to go through all these time-consuming steps over and over again,
Usually you only do it once and make a so-called stage4 image with your own basesytem utilities and custom configuration. Then installing a Gentoo is probably quicker than any other distribution (one tar xf... is usually far more efficient than multiple packages installation). Granted, it takes time and probably half a dozen installs to get more efficient than a Debian/Ubuntu admin (unless she uses the same tar method which is in no way out of the reach of a competent Linux admin).
If you use production systems you should have a staging farm on which to build your stage4 when you want it to have updated packages and test updates before applying them to production systems (which . The only time spent is the one the computer spends compiling, the amount of time of the admin is roughly the same (and given that you don't have to hunt in various repositories for the soft you need or package it yourself, it usually is less than the time spent on other distributions).
it's just not a very effective system for servers, but it's a great system for people who like to play around with just about everything there is in Linux.
It's great for both, you just don't use it in the same way if you are a sysadmin of a big farm or use your own computer.
My Ubuntu experience has been: install it, configure it in a few hours and then just install the security updates as they come along. And if I update, I do it with peace of mind that everything will keep on running as smooth as a baby's bottom
My Ubuntu experience has been: install it, configure it in a few minutes, then upgrade to the next major release, see it break badly (meaning missing core libraries) and spend an afternoon fetching the pieces. I had the bad luck of installing Ubuntu 5 just before the Ubuntu 6 release and so I was still a newbie in respect of Ubuntu's (Debian's in fact) apt / aptitude and such package management utilities. I don't resent Ubuntu for that, just my lack of knowledge of the utilities. I probably went outside the safe path without knowing it.
Don't mistake lack of expertise of the admin with the distribution defaults. Gentoo probably asks for more investments than other distributions but usually big investments like these are a good sign for productivity on the long term.
Lionel.
[snip]
Thank you so much for writing this: I’ve been looking for exactly something like this. I figured that there was an easy way to use Gentoo once you became an experienced admin, and I am definitely not… this was exactly the information that I needed.
Note: I am not the OP… just wanted to thank Lionel.
I couldn't disagree with this more strongly, though I think I understand the spirit of the comment.
I think I would say: Don't use Gentoo for production unless you really know what you're doing, in which case, don't use anything else.
I have to disagree here I'm currently running over 150 production Rails servers on Gentoo and could not be more happy with our choice of distro. It definitely takes more work to get setup right. But once it is setup right no other distro can touch it for flexibility and tunability.
Cheers- -- Ezra Zygmuntowicz-- Lead Rails Evangelist -- ez@engineyard.com -- Engine Yard, Serious Rails Hosting -- (866) 518-YARD (9273)
OK, I take back my words, after all, it was just what I was recommended by friends who did run on Gentoo servers. I like to call myself fairly knowledgable when it comes to Linux, but not an expert, maybe that’s also the reason they recommended me to stick with Ubuntu. That said, I’m really happy with ubuntu as a production server.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
I have to disagree here
Do you find all the compiling an issue? I've heard quite a few people express that as a problem (coming from a desktop gentoo user).
Since I work with Ezra, I'll answer this one.
Setting up a new system takes a lot of time, but then you can maintain your own binary distribution from that point forward.
When we install new packages at Engine Yard, there's rarely any compiling involved, only for new versions, and once it's compiled once, it's not compiled again.
And each and every thing we build is 100% optimized for our environment, just the way we want it.
This question is very general so I'll probably not answer it entirely.
We utilize a SAN, so I cannot speak to hard drive failures in a more typical configuration.
Suffice it to say, however, that I don't believe that Gentoo is lacking anything in the way of management, with exception, of course, to the commercial offerings that may be included in commercial distributions.