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Hosting providers, meet reality check

Fred Oliveira on August 1, 2006

Around here, we’ve been hosting projects on the web for the longest time. However for the last couple of years most of our development has been rails-centric, and hosting providers haven’t been helping at all.

Like us, there are many companies out there who are using rails to deploy applications for their clients or their own projects. Rails hosting is a growing necessity but the existing solutions are either mediocre or dumb. And when I say “dumb” I mean the provider doesn’t even know how rails scales or operates - all they know is they have it and that it “should work great out of the box” - and, you guessed it, it doesn’t.

Here’s what developers need

We need hosting companies that care about people developing web applications and the people that end up using them. We need the service to be reliable, because critical applications that don’t tolerate downtime. We need providers that understand the necessity of having an application up and running fast and with as little trouble as possible. We need providers who don’t hide behind support forms, and actually speak the same language as ourselves.

Companies like us, and many others, care deeply about the quality of service you people offer. Are there providers out there thinking and speaking “2.0″? If so, we definitely want to hear from you.

Related Link: Dedicated servers or dedicated hosting is a good way to host multiple sites, or just mission-critical applications that need their own resources.


Comments on this post

Nate

Check out mosso.com, I know they target developers such as yourselves.

Jeremy

I have been somewhat pleased with my account from media temple, although I probably would have moved to something else if it wasn’t for the lure of their soon to be relased upgrade: Shared Server 6.0 aka Grid Server.

Walker Hamilton

You should check out “EngineYard.com”:http://www.engineyard.com. I saw Ezra Zygmuntowicz speak at RailsConf about Rails deployment environments and he gave a little spiel at the end of his presentation on this company. They’re doing single click, pre-donfigured deployment. It sounded like something that most people who like to have access to every facet of their web app wouldn’t like, but it sounded amazing for developers who need a deployment environment that “just works”.

Walker Hamilton

hrmph. no textile.

Robert

The first hoster that comes to mind is TextDrive (http://www.textdrive.com). Head some great things about their support, and they where one of the first to use RoR in shared hosting I think.

Mike Rumble

I’d second the recommendation for TextDrive. Their servers come ready to run Rails, FCGI and plenty of other goodies. They’re, by their own admission, server geeks which means they adhere to best practices with everything kept running smoothly and up-to-date.

Jacob

You might check out Steel Pixel http://www.steelpixel.com.

It is run by two developers who work primarily in a rails environment.

Josh Owens

Jacob,

Thanks for mentioning us and bringing this to my attention :). We do indeed provide rails hosting. We have been hard at work trying to provide a quality rails hosting experience, as you might be able to glean from http://wiki.steelpixel.com. We have written custom rake tasks and capistrano deployment files to get your app working in our default setup. We have been looking at switching to mongrel. We have setup subversion that is free for everyone that hosts with us. We moved our box to a much beefier server to accomodate all the typo users (the memory leak has been fixed, so we have lots of extra memory now:). We also try to take an active role in learning edge rails and applying to our own apps that we run on the same box.

We also run the Web 2.0 Show, which is part of the same web 2.0 workgroup as your site. Sometimes you just have to look no further than your own “backyard” ;). In the interest of fairness I would suggest you check out TextDrive, Railsmachine, and Planet Argon for quality rails hosting too.

blinking8s

Justin over at http://encytemedia.com told me about http://railsmachine.com/

Justin Palmer

I sure did. :-) Me and Rick Olson (http://techno-weenie.net) are both on RailsMachine accounts. I’ve not been with them but about a week or so, but if your using Capistrano to deploy your applications it’s IMO the best experience you’ll get with deployment…I’m no server admin, and I had a good experience with it.

You install a custom ‘railsmachine’ gem and it generates a custom deploy script for you. Everything is setup and there is no mucking around with configuring and/or installing web servers. I never once touched any type of server configuration. Surprisingly, things just work.

The people running RailsMachine are also Rails developers themselves who are actively involved in the community.

Michael Air

If you’re not going dedicated then RailsMachine - definitely the best rails hosting on the market by far.

Don’t touch Textdrive, they’ve only got worse as time has progressed and shared rails hosting seems to be a recipe for disaster anyway. Too many people nuking resources.

Matt

Might I recommend Slicehost? We built our company for developers. People who need more control and performance, but not quite dedicated prices. Machines opening up next week. Stop by with any questions or speecial requests. We are hardcore Rails developers ourselves. The management backend is actually written in Ruby, the portal in Rails.

http://www.slicehost.com

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