Hosting with email accounts?

Heroku seems to have pretty much become the standard for Rails apps just starting out. Any time anyone asks which is the best host, the answer always seems to be Heroku.

But, correct me if I'm wrong, Heroku does not include email accounts with their service?

Most 'traditional' shared hosts also let you set up email accounts for your domain, but I don't see anything like that on Heroku. Their plan is basically for just hosting your site. I also need email accounts.

Is there a solution for this for Heroku? I imagine if there is, it's not free, or involves hosting emails elsewhere.

If not, then what is the best cheap host (this is just a portfolio site, no heavy traffic) that INCLUDES email accounts as well?

Thanks

don’t use heroku, but at least in Germany there are virtual root servers with full DNS control and integrated mail servers for less than 15 USD (10 Eur) a month.

They are also powerful enough to run a few rack apps.

Because you can't get the same thing in the US, UK, Australia, Insert your country here.

After a little more searching, I discovered webfaction.com which seems pretty good in terms of Rails support.

Most of the reviews I read were really good, the occasional issue which all hosts will have, but far fewer than most. Plus a 60 day refund policy, so I may just try them out.

Anyone else have experience with Web Faction?

Sorry, wasn’t meant to be imperative, there is missing a simple “I”, I can’t now about the prices in the whole world but in Germany. So I wrote that this applies to Germany. I still hoped that there are similar offers all over the world, because I often realized that in hosting not really the amount to pay differs, but the actual performance of the hosting service.

VPS.Net offers servers for around $20 a month starting, they are all over the world (so it's somewhat good for the price they offer but I can't comment on them for personal reasons). Amazon's cheapest server runs about $15 a month (though they are in selective markets outside of the US, Western Europe and Asia, in mid-Europe they are pretty spread out leaving much to be desired for fast connections.)

Heroku's problem is not price, it's a good price for the infrastructure you get (to a certain extent until the math breaks your wallet) the problem is the infrastructure itself, and not directly related to the infrastructure but to the location of it, it's a single location in a single point and I don't know if they ever plan to branch out into other markets making their service even more price worthy. It's easy to scale out, it's hard to scale out across the world unless you get all pro like Cloudflare did and trick out the deployment methods you use but not many people think like they do when it comes to scaling.

Lots of hosting providers start at or around $15-$20. I would look more at their infrastructure and the problems they have with it before I look at the price. For example with Heroku the problem comes down to a single location, eventually you'll want your own infrastructure, probably long before you care about the price. In the past certain other providers had huge problems with their storage. With Mediatemple you'll eventually get pissed off at the root access but lack of access to the Kernel (unless they changed that since I was there testing.) At Amazon you'll probably think you're okay until you realize there are better ways if you can get it right (but again that is hard to do so for most it's just not worth the initial cost to do it right since there could be a huge margin of error depending on your team.)

At other hosting providers you might do great for a while then when you end up having an IO heavy site, you get tore down and end up killing the entire hypervisor so you get killed by them so you move to Amazon and then get hit with huge IO costs (because IO costs there, and it can cost a lot depending on what type of IO you want and how much of it you want to secure) so then you end up thinking about scaling into your own hardware but again that's hard to do right if you want to spread out and not remain in a single location which brings you back to a Heroku like situation.

So for me it always comes down to how much IO costs, how much can I secure and how much is that premium IO going to cost me and whether or not the company that is going to be hosting me or my clients can handle that IO or if they are used to tailoring to sites that think they need a VPS but really don't or just have it for security reasons but don't really need the full power.

Most 'traditional' shared hosts also let you set up email accounts for your domain, but I don't see anything like that on Heroku. Their plan is basically for just hosting your site. I also need email accounts.

Is there a solution for this for Heroku? I imagine if there is, it's not free, or involves hosting emails elsewhere.

Unless you're doing stuff like automatically processing email sent to you, there's no reason not to host your email completely separately from your web apps. In particular google will host your email for free (and provide a gmail web interface to it) for up to 10 users (beyond that you'll have to pay). All you have to do is sign up for the service and point your domain's mx records at their servers. Your actual applications can be wherever you want.

Fred