I come from the ASP.NET world where I used to get a shared hosting plan
at a host and simply deployed various projects to different folders via
FTP, assigning various domain names to each folder. Easy, unlimited
different apps. Costs me about $150/year.
Now, I'm having about 20 Rails apps ready to be deployed (all of them
with a database), none of which
will generate any kind of money but each being hit about 20k times per
day. What would you recommend as a hosting solution that won't kill my
budget as well as allow the flexibility I'm used to?
You could use DigitalOcean: $5/month for an SSD-backed VPS. If you use this referral link, I will get a small kickback, but you should use them anyway. DigitalOcean – The developer cloud
20 Rails apps might just run out the RAM on that $5/mo offering. But DO doesn't seem like a bad solution for the budget-minded. Heroku gets expensive fast, as do others. I have a Gandi VPS that is running about $40/mo (way more that $150/yr) that can support quite a few apps, but nothing that gets /.-ed or @neilhimself-d. (Happened. Boom.) DO's up-teir plans are still pretty cheap.
I think the best solution should be take have a machine on Rackspace that will cost around 100$/month, on which you can deploy any number of application you want without extra cost.
Might be cheaper and better to simply host on simple machines at
DigitalOcean or AWS, both of which have tiny little machines that
range anywhere between $5 and $15 a month and are perfect sizes for
single applications. But I've always held the though that unless
there is isolation hosting multiple apps on the same server just isn't
worth the trouble.
We have Several VPSes set up with crucial paradigm. Depending on number of CPU and RAM etc the price can vary. We host up to 20 different Rails instances on the larger servers and about 5 on the smaller.
It'll all depend on how heavy the usage is on the applications as to which way you go. I find the VPS is good because we have complete control over what is installed - however other people might think that's a drawback as you have to administer the server yourself too.
Go to a host that allows you to scale your VMs up. Start with a very small server (as many people have said) and then use something like the NewRelic Free account to monitor your resources usage and you can then scale it up to the level you need.
What would you classify as killing your budget? You will probably need to give more background information, such as how large are the DB’s (<100MB?, 1GB? 10GB?) and how processor intensive each app is (are you doing any background image re sizing using imagemagick?). Do you need all the apps to be running off of one dedicated box, one VPS, or does it not matter?
As others have said, heroku gets expensive fast, but they are reliable. You can get rather cheap VPS’s from various places such as digitalocean or OVH, heck, you can even get a lame dedicated server from OVH now for a measly five bucks a month. Amazon allows you to get a micro instance for free for a year if you are a new customer, so you can try that out as a starting point if you are interested in using amazon. You can also rent instances from amazon on an hourly rate, so if you want you can rent their highest level instance as a spot instance for less than thirty cents an hour, giving you an idea of how much ram and storage you need.
