I have this "little" project(http://startrader.wordpress.com) that I've
been working on for a while, and I'm at the point were I'd like to put
up a bit of public facing code. I spent last week looking at various
web hosting companies, and now I need to make a decision.
My conundrum is whether to go with a Virtual Private Server or a shared
host. If everything goes like it does in my day dreams, I'll need all
the capacity I can get, but in reality, I don't expect more then a
couple dozen hits a day any time in the next eight months, so I don't
really need anything more then a shared host at the moment. On the
other hand, the chance to have root access on my own VPS slice seems
like it would be good experience, more interesting, and quite a bit more
work. This would be my first public facing application, and there is
the thought that it might be easier to let a shared host deal with the
nuts and bolts the first time 'round.
I guess what I'm looking for is advice and other peoples experiences.
Company recommendations would also be appreciated. (I have $250USD to
get started).
I use slicehost.com. The smallest slice is $20/month and it's been
working just fine for me so far. And if you need to upgrade, its
really easy and affordable. The only down side is setting it up to
serve a rails project but their instructions make that relatively
easy. For me, it took a couple days to get the server setup.
Your other option is www.heroku.com which lets you create/import
projects on the fly. I am using them as well to create tiny test
projects where I learn stuff. I honestly don't know of performance of
heroku because I haven't put it to the test. My main site is on
slicehost.
$250 will get you 8 months on GoDaddy - 10GB / 500GB with Linux:
CentOS (4 or 5) or Red Hat Fedora Core 7. + an SSL certificate. But
you wouldn't be able to expect anything in the way of support. Their
shared hosting, though, is WAY cheap. I got three years for $120.
A Small Orange has RoR 2.0. And Joyient is pretty RoR too.
I use slicehost. The main win for me is the ability to have complete
control over the slice. Having root access means that I can configure
one of their canned installs to exactly fit my needs, can reboot is as
required and can pretty much add whatever package I want. The price is
pretty good and the service is great. We'll be using them a lot more
in future.
The time to get your experience building out and deploying is when you *don't* have a ton of traffic. My experience is that migrating servers when there is live traffic is a freakin nightmare. I'm using Rimuhosting and they are VPS but provide a ton of free support so you don't feel quite so alone. They're pricier than Slicehost, though.
www.mediatemple.net is very good, they have a grid-server plan which
works great and comes with a 64MB rails container and 100GB of space
for $20/month. You can easily add more RAM to your container should
you grow beyond the "2-3" app limit.
I'm considering upgrading to one of their more beefier dedicated
virtual's, Which for $50/month you get 256MB Ram, 20GB HD and 1TB
bandwidth.
Thank you all for all the help. I have decided that a slice at
SliceHost was the right way to go. You can see the initial results at:
http://blog/antarestrader.com
