Inexpensive Rails Hosting for Small Business Client

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a commercial Radiant-based website that I manage for a small- business client. They pay me a flat annual fee to do so, but lacking any other clients to split the cost between (and I have no plans of getting more), their fee doesn't cover the entire cost of the hosting service I use for it.

What recommendations do others have for low-cost Rails hosting?

2

depending on the level of traffic, i recommend heroku

3

I've heard this recommendation before, but isn't the minimum cost of heroku $36/mo ?

4

No, it is 0. There website is confusing, they are aware of this and are hopefully clarifying this,

5

No, it is 0. There website is confusing, they are aware of this and are hopefully clarifying this,

depending on the level of traffic, i recommend heroku

I’ve heard this recommendation before, but isn’t the minimum cost of

heroku $36/mo ?

Yeah - they are $0 to get started, then you pay to increase bandwidth/throughput. I am not sure how it goes if you start getting a lot of volume in terms of how the cost of heroku compares to others, but for the sheer ease and slickness of easy deployments, creating multiple environments (such as staging vs production), automated backups available (at least for pg), and so much more, unless someone has a specific reason not to use them, heroku is amazing. I hope their model is the general wave of the future, at least for us who would rather create functionality than configure boxes.

6

Indeed. I fully agree about the great features.

So I might try it. In fact, come to think of it, I might try contacting them directly and see what their take on my kind of business case is.

Thanks!

7

I've been using Heroku for a while, and if you are doing a few small apps, I suggest setting up some CRON jobs to ping your server every 15 minutes or so… The non paid service will shut down your site when idle for a certain period of time… if you ping your site intermiddely, in theory it shouldn't shut down.

I found this important when showing working prototypes to clients, as I didn't want to pay to host until it was ready for production, but a 30 second lag when showing a client, wasn't going to cut it.

Let me know if this helps,

Jonny

8

An alternative option to that is to create an google office account for each site, create an email there, use that email to sign up for pingdom.com and have them poll your site. Solves a couple of problems at once.