Can anyone recommend a really good hosting provider for Rails development? It’s important that it’s a reseller account, or at least a company I can work with to act as a proxy for my clients and their websites.
Talk to Engine Yard. I am sure they can work out arrangements that are satisfactory.
Michael
The first rule of Rails hosting is you absolutely need at least a VPS. Dedicated memory is essential, but the next most important thing is the actual VPS setup. There's a lot of overselling in the VPS industry which can really cripple performance due to disk contention and whatnot. To make matters worse, finding reliable information on-line is very difficult. I highly recomment the HostingFu blog for technically sound and unbiased information (http://hostingfu.com/).
Once you have a host, the next problem is getting a Rails stack setup. I have an account with Railsmachine, and their gem is top-notch for quickly getting up and running, but it doesn't make provisions for multiple accounts. I'm not sure about EngineYard's setup, but they are very professional, and would be my first choice for working on something really cutting edge. Other VPS or dedicated servers will work too, but you're basically on your own for setup.
When you say "reselling" it's not really clear exactly what you mean. Are you just charging clients for hosting? Because if so you can really use any system. If you just want them to be able to setup email accounts and whatnot, a standard control panel installed by either you or your VPS provider will probably suffice. However, if you're talking about actual reselling Rails hosting where your customers can setup their own Rails applications themselves, then you're getting into virgin territory. I think this kind of thing is coming, and maybe you will be one of the people to innovate in this area. I know there's a lot of talk about imaging of standard Rails setups for easy use on VPSes, and that's definitely a place to start.
