We're currently hosting on Media Temple, but their Grid Servers are
letting us down. We've had an average of two calls per week to them w/
reliability issues - they just keep going down for 20-30 minutes at a
time.
So, we're looking for a reliable RoR host that we can do multi-site
hosting on. Nothing to big for now, just three blogs running Mephisto
and/or WordPress. Eventually, we're going to have some small internal
apps that we'll need to host on the servers. We'd also like to be able
to stay with that hosting provider, even if we have to move to a
different type of hosting, when we start scaling our apps.
And we want it to be easy to setup out of the gate.
I'm currently using hostingrails.com - here's my experience:
Pros:
- resonable inexpensive
- you get a lot for your money
- fairly easy out the gate setup
- good set-up/config information available in their forums
- service is pretty fast so far but few users on my server
Cons:
- not much help if you have a real problem - they try but responses
can be slow (we were down 3 hours last Thursday - didn't respond to
help requests until sometime after we were back up)
- requires a year upfront payment
- I get the opinion they are learning as they go
So, if you want to do some simple strightforward hosting and you know
your way around cPanel then it's probably fine. Pretty cheap, even
given yearly payment and you do get a lot for your money (at the top
end 150meg dedicated for mongrels)
I use slicehost.com to host my blog and some other apps. It's very
good and if uptime isn't critical then they'll definitely be great for
you. By "if uptime isn't critical" I don't mean that they're down a
lot though (I haven't noticed any downtime), I just mean "if uptime
isn't critical."
At work, we deploy our app to engineyard.com. So far they've been
kick ass. You seriously don't have to do anything...just write your
app and they take care of the rest. When you sign up you tell them
what gems you want on your slice, and they send you back an email with
all your info as well as a Capistrano recipe that's tailored to their
setup. Support has been great, they respond within minutes most of
the time, and usually when they respond it's because they've fixed
your problem.
Of course you pay for fully managed service like that. Like I said,
we write the code and they handle everything when it comes to
deployment. If you just want a reliable place to deploy your apps,
and you can manage your own server, then slicehost is a great choice.
I have been talking to engineyard.com. They are VERY knoweldgable
about Rails hosting. Not the cheapest, but top notch service as far
as I can tell. Hopefully I will be working with them soon on a
project.
Hello Todd, I'm Maykel from SpeedyRails.com, we offer fully managed
shared and dedicated hosting, this mean we will always help you, no
matter if you have a shared or dedicated plan, if the problem is in
the OS or your application, we will always help you solve the
problems. We have fair prices for shared hosting (one Rails
application per account) and also very good prices for fully managed
dedicated servers, so you don't have to be a linux expert to have your
own dedicated box to host many rails applications. Do not hesitate to
contact us, we will be happy to assist you.
Sorry for the chimes, but I don't have experience with other providers
(although I know EngineYard and Rails Machine are very good too!)