RubyOnRails Inexpensive Hosting Service [closed]
I am looking for a hosting service to host RoR (Ruby on Rails) applications. Please suggest hosting services where I can get an inexpensive plan.
What are the best options out for hosting when you are going live with public release?
Thanks.
Heroku's hosting starts from free and is extremely easy to deploy a Rails app to. If you apps are relatively small then they're well worth a look.
Shared I would go with Dreamhost. On a VPS I've used Slicehost (great documentation), and VPS.net - both work well. I've also heard good things about Linode too but haven't used them. For colo or dedicated it's pretty tough to beat FDC Servers for price and the sheer amount of bandwidth you get.
You might hear some horror stories about Dreamhost but if you want to keep it cheap and moving later is an option go with them to start. I launched a Rails site with them and got hit pretty hard right away (thanks TechCrunch!) and they kept me up and running through the traffic surge.
Slicehost was purchased by Rackspace and their technology rebranded as Rackspace Cloud Servers - same technology, same people, but they did some very nice things with pricing:
You pay by the hour instead of by the month, so you can do things like throw up a test server for a day, or spin up 10 servers for an hour every night to handle some monster process you need to deal with, or in the span of a couple minutes triple the capacity of your site when you launch.
They split out the bandwidth from the hosting costs. For most sites, especially ones getting started, you aren't going to use that much bandwidth and their plans will be much less expensive as a result.
Rackspace support is phenomenal, you can always find someone to help you.
As someone else mentioned, Slicehost (Rackspace), Linode and most of the other hosts listed here all provide basically a blank server that you have to setup (install your database, webserver, rails, etc. on). If you are just getting started, you should really check out Heroku which abstracts away a tremendous amount of the work necessary to just get going.