Spot on commentary on Textdrive. I went with them because of their support of the ruby community, but it has been a real pain. When they weren’t terminating lighttpd. their process bots were killing my rails migrations midway through leaving me with trashed databases. The mysql commands weren’t responding to nice, so I’ve resorted to replicating my rails setup on my own machine, backuping the server database, restoring it locally, working with it, and transfering it back… repeatedly. It will kill your motivation to develop pretty damn quickly.

I plan to find somewhere new soon before the end of my contract year.

It’s insane to maintain that many hosts. I run Apache 2 with a couple of static sites, MyISAM-optimized MySQL 5, a blog (modified Typo), four Camping apps, a production Rails app, a staging install for said app, another in-development app with staging server, a huge subversion repository, and a Trac instance, all on a single 1024mb Slicehost Ubuntu slice.

Also, Slicehost offers automated daily backups and on-demand restore. It works, too; I rebuilt from one once.

“A single Rails app or blog” is hardly the limit if you know what you’re doing. I had a Rimuhosting VPS for a while, but Slicehost is much faster.

Thanks for the great article. Sadly, you published it a little bit to late for me. I already walked through the Dreamhost and TextDrive “hell” myself. :) I will now order a nice VPS here in Germany, and will be happy with it….

I’ve found Slicehost to be great. You can ‘reset’ your slice reloading the OS from scratch so you can practice setting up stuff (and then learn to automate it). It has it’s own ajaxy console thing incase you lock yourself out (no need to contact support and wait for them to fix your firewall problems).

You can’t really run a Rails site (yet) without knowing at least a little bit of *nix now-a-days. Though that said, I find it simpler to set up a Rails app on plain old *nix than having to learn the ‘TextDrive way’ or ‘Dreamhost way’ which have their own little quirks (reminds me of windows quicks, ugh).

So I’d recommend: learn some *nix, use something like Slicehost, outsource your DNS and Mail (to people like easydns.com).

I’m at loss though why people keep recommending TextDrive because they’re the ‘official’ Rails hosting… No offence to the team but it’s one of the last places you should consider hosting your apps (with the exception of perhaps their high end slice type hosting, which is unmanaged, but you can get a whole server with four times the spec for an extra $100 US with RackSpace… which is what we ended up going with for our production app that has been running for the last 6 months).

Whoops, not easydns.com, I meant dnsmadeeasy.com :O

Topfunky, to me, every alternate configuration I have in the wild is another set of potential security issues. So I would rather consolidate as much as possible, even if it means running experimental stuff in the same environment as production stuff. Anything of mine that’s very experimental is never publicly accessible to begin with. So rather than degrading the security of my production environment, I view it as increasing the security of my experimental environment, and significantly reducing my maintenance.

Sometimes I do use User-mode Linux if want to try something completely insane. I can proxy from Apache on the slice through to a Slackware UML instance with its own sandboxed webserver: nginx, boa, zeus, whatever.

I have a dedicated server I maintain for a client, but even though it’s a piece of relatively heavy iron, I can’t put much time or thought into security issues for it because the scope of the benefit is so limited.

PS. Sent you an email a bit ago; don’t know if you got it.

Interesting, I’ve just been researching hosting for our new Rails app (which is pretty resource intensive) & ended up recommending Dreamhost – mainly for their insane amounts of bandwidth, plus I didn’t want to be stuck looking after the server. I might have to reconsider my choices now.

The MediaTemple Grid Server stuff looks incredibly good, the only problem I could see with them was that they don’t have MySQL 5, and haven’t got any plans for installing it in the near future. Does anyone have any experience running Rails apps on MT? I’d be keen to see how they compare to DreamHost.

I’ve recently signed up for a Slicehost 256MB plan for all my personal stuff, and so far it’s been great. I’m yet too see how it goes under heavy load though.

Great article and I completely agree with Dreamhost. My blog (Mephisto running on FastCGI) dies about one day every other week. It can serve the cached files, but I can’t login to the admin section or leave comments. So, I mostly use Dreamhost for Subversion + static sites.

I’ll be getting a Slicehost VPS soon for learning + staging applications. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun tearing down and rebuilding a server =P, and they have tons of glowing reviews + they’re really cheap.

Do you do a lot of testing/staging of multiple apps on Slicehost?

I’ve been with MediaTemple through the switch to GRID, and I’ve never had any trouble with their Rails hosting. I suppose I have no comparison with respect to speed, but I haven’t noticed any sluggish load times with my rails apps. Plus, they’re a pretty responsive company when it comes to technical support.

Thanks for the writeup Topfunky. Choosing a rails host can be daunting, a guide like this will certainly help people make a decision.

We built Slicehost because as rails developers, we found the alternatives unacceptable. We’re die hard ruby and rails users ourselves, so rest assured we’ll continue building our platform to please the community.

And thanks to our customers for representing!

Another +1 here for Slicehost, they simply rock in every way possible so far. (Been with them 5 months, been building websites, servers and hosting for 10 years.)

Great writeup.

I have to chime in as another Slicehost fan—I’ve been with them for four months now and am extremely satisfied running my two camping apps, three Mephisto blogs, Trac site, and public SVN repository. The guys behind it are super accessible with a Campfire room, an IRC room, forums, and a helpful wiki. Plus they let me run Gentoo. Good stuff.

funk, great article. i’ve had considerable problems with dreamhost, and just recently was able to stop the 500 errors. Once the 500’s stop, and your app is a cached blog like mine, it seems to do the trick. but for anything more than a non-critical cached app, i can’t imagine using them.

thanks for the recommendations. am writing a few apps right now that will need much more support and reliability than textdrive or dreamhost, so it’s good to have some options. do us a favor and update this article when you run into any other problems with certain hosts..

btw, are you still coming up to slc in a few weeks?

I was sad to see planet argon off the list. I’ve been pretty happy with them (though i still haven’t pushed my apps too far), and was curious how they compared since I’ve never tried anything else.

excellent! this is just in time. i’ve been looking for a host and wanted to try aforementioned hosts. i’ll give slicehost a try. it should be fun. thanks ;p

Slicehost looks like something to check out. I’ve been using JohnCompanies for several years and am very satisfied. They are very responsive, no-nonsense, and have great offerings, including FreeBSD. The servers are rock-solid. Slicehost’s prices are enticing, though. Topfunky, I agree about TextDrive. I basically use my mixed grill for some SVN and mail. I’m curious if anyone has tried their new Solaris offerings.

+1 For Slicehost. I have been with them for several weeks now and have had nothing but a pleasant experience. I idle around in their IRC channel – which also serves as a great means of support. The few questions I did have when I just started out were always answered within minutes.

Slicehost users seem to be building their own little community, which is always nice to see.

I’ve been happy so far with my hosting at railsplayground.com. I have a VPS there and haven’t had any problems that I didn’t create myself. Granted, I’m still in the experimental stage and don’t have more than a few users yet.

I also spent some time today talking with Mike Culver of Amazon Web Services today, and I’m definitely going to be looking into hosting with their Elastic Computer Cloud. It looks like a very nice way to go if you’re worried about speed of ramp-up.

Nice rundown of some of the options you have when looking for a Ruby on Rails hosting company. I have myself compiled a list of possible Rails hosts at Rails hosting info. You can compare and review various hosting companies, 60 at the moment. I would also like to encourage all people already having experience with any of these companies to leave their review (good or bad), so that others don’t have to go the same road as topfunky ;)

I’ve had my RimuHosting VPS for about 2 years now. I didn’t mind doing the admin work, but I switched a little while ago because I couldn’t seem to get a stable architecture working.

I’ve migrated a couple of things over to MediaTemple’s “Grid Server” and it’s been pretty good- not really had any problems with downtime and any problems with MySQL have been mitigated by a lot of the content being cached (and thus served directly from Apache). So far so good.

I also recently purchased a Joyent Connector account (which includes a TextDrive account). This was primarily for Strongspace as I wanted some online backup space for my digital photos. I’ve only tried to get one app running, but it got killed almost instantly so I didn’t bother. But, their webmail is excellent (and good spam/virus protection is on the way), and, SVN is easy to setup. So, I use it mainly for email and svn. But, I have a feeling I might migrate to one of their Accelerator’s sometime soon and get everything consolidated- silly to have 4/5 different hosting accounts!

Alternatively, I’d recommend

http://www.contegix.com
Contegix

They host a number of Rails sites for me and their support is top notch. Someone answers the phone 24 hours a day and most tickets are turned around within minutes. Others have had similar experiences:

http://www.robsanheim.com/2006/12/20/contegix-is-amazing-plus-thoughts-on-rails-hosting/

I have been using the mediatemple grid server for some rails apps and there are a few quirks, but it’s not too bad. I am very happy with their stuff. And they are launching a new mysql thing that will allow you to run version 5 if you like. It’s in beta now.

I have been looking at slicehost recently as well. Please keep us updated with how it goes.

Wow, that’s amazing that you manage that many servers! I’ve been very enticed by slicehosting’s prices, it’s nice to see a writeup on the differences of each type of hosting.

I host with railsplayground.com and they provide fantastic support, I usually get a response within the hour. When I first started looking for a host, I ran a quick test to see how good their support is, I just sent them each an email asking simple questions about their rails/ruby setup to see how quick the responded and railsplayground responded within 15 minutes! It was a great indicator as to how good a host is/might be.

Thanks for writeup, hope you can do a follow up.

The only problem that I have with using a vps like rimuhosting or slicehost is the mailserver setup. Running a mailserver can be a fulltime job. If i could have a mailserver run by someone else, but have my own slicehost, that would be the best of both worlds.

so do you point just your mail records in dns to dreamhost?

+1 for slicehost here too. I’m so impressed that it’s run by Rails devs, was in the hosting business long before it opened up to the public, and lets me run Gentoo :-)

Thanks for this writeup. I’m a happy slicehost’r.

Are the actual peepcode screencasts served from RailsMachine too? I’ve been impressed with the download speeds and assumed you were using cachefly or a similar svc.

Very good article. I have experience with Dreamhost, TextDrive, Site5, Hostopia, Rackspace, ServInt, and now RailsMachine.

I just want to say that my Dreamhost server load is usually between 1 and 3, so you might consider requesting a transfer to another server. I consider Dreamhost to have the best techs of any shared host. They’re huge and they’ve dealt with nightmare DoS and hardware failure issues that the little guys pray they never face (intermittent router failure that 5 Cisco certs couldn’t figure out for weeks at a time). They have dedicated MySQL servers, and assign you to a MySQL server for life. The downside is a little db latency, but the plus side is someone thrashing mysql won’t affect your static files. As far as Rails go, the dynamic fcgi thing is just a performance killer. But overall on my low-traffic Rails sites I’ve been fairly successful.

Ultimately though you are right that shared hosts aren’t setup for Rails in any way. Rails shifts load issues from CPU to RAM, and that flips the resource utilization equation on its head from Apache SAPI modules or even plain old CGI. I wrote about that a while ago on my blog (hosted on TextDrive with basically no downtime for a year since my CPU usage is low).

I’m gonna put in a plug for RailsMachine. A dedicated server or VPS is necessary for mission-critical Rails apps, but navigating the latest Rails deployment techniques can be tricky, even for an experienced sysadmin-type. RailsMachine gives you a gem that gets you up and running fast, plus they are new and still small so there is no ‘level 1’ tech support. In fact, Mongrel committer Bradley Taylor has responded to all my support requests so far—that’s kind of like Level 100 tech support with no escalation! Their setup is pretty sensible, and I was able to extend their Capistrano recipe for my specific app which does quite a bit outside of the standard Rails/Capistrano box.

Currently my problem is that I’m doing a lot of small Rails apps for clients who don’t want to pay a lot for hosting. I wish that someone would figure out the Rails shared hosting equation… there’s no way it can be anywhere near as cheap as Dreamhost, but I could see something like $5/month per app happening for small apps if done correctly. Assuming 2 dispatchers per app, you are talking about 60MB per app resident memory. With RailsMachine that’s still $25/app at least until you have

Thanks for the reviews. We’ve been contemplating a move for several months. After reading this article and the comments, we’re looking very seriously at Slicehost. Thanks again.

Geoffrey’s setup sounds a lot like mine before last week; I had my Rails sites living on a VPS at Blue Box, and my SVN hosted on one of those “lifetime” accounts at TextDrive. Sadly, because of some recent reliability problems I just had to move my SVN to a RimuHosting VPS, so right now I use TextDrive to host two static sites and that’s it. (And one of those is moving soon.) And it’s as true now as it was last year that trying to serve Rails apps on a TextDrive shared box is a road paved with misery.

I will say, however, that TextDrive/Joyent’s new “Accelerator” offering - Solaris containers, roughly equivalent to a Linux VPS - are really, really great for Rails deployment, if nothing else. I set up a client site on one last month and the performance is fantastic. The Accelerators are still pretty expensive ($125/mo and higher), but they say they’re coming out with less expensive ones in the next month or two.

Slicehost is pretty slick. I love it how when you hit the order button your slice is built right there and then.

This is definitely spot on. I’m honestly a little embarrassed that I recommended TextDrive at one time to a few people, I didn’t know any better at the time. The lockdown on your app can be incredibly frustrating.

I’ve used half of the hosts you’ve reviewed here, and I’ve arrived at Slicehost now and I’m happy…

Have you used Media Temple yet? I’m curious as to what you think of them.

I concur on TextDrive. I somehow made a mistake and paid for year worth of “service”. The site is down almost daily, sometimes an hour and more. I have feeling the servers get rebooted daily.

I do not think that TextDrive knows how to host shared accounts. I have Windows based host Crystaltech, that really made me forget what kind of pain shared hosting can be.

Now I am looking for the host other than TextDrive… I am wondering why nobody has turn-key Rails hosting. Just upload the files and off you go…

Has anyone tried GoDaddy’s Ruby hosting yet?

Hi Denis, turn-key Rails hosting already exists :) ... take a look at speedyrails.com, we are working very hard to keep it as the easiest to use rails hosting service around (my apologies for the shameless promotion)... I have read (in silence) enough about shared hosting providers on this post and I think it’s time to introduce our service… :)

I would like to throw another Rails host that I think is perfect for small apps: ASmallOrange (http://www.asmallorange.com).

ASmallOrange is a pretty small company and they treat their customer service like that. I can get a hold of someone in about 10 seconds and they’re always responsive and helpful.

Another nice thing is how they’re happy to install software on your particular shared machine. If a certain Gem isn’t on your server all you have to do is ask.

And price is not to be forgotten. You can get a year of hosting with them for $30. That’s $2.5/mo. And it’s pretty snappy.

http://www.asmallorange.com

Would have loved to hear your thoughts on Media Temple’s new Grid Servers. I’ve heard mixed reviews on it, and am still considering it as an option for an upcoming app.

Media Temple works just great. Of course if you have a big app you should upgrade to dedicated virtual (ds).

Cheers

I’ve been pretty happy with site5.com. The customer service and the response time on any tickets or requests is fantastic. I submitted requests for a couple of gems and they were really quick about getting them installed.

Textdrive is not fit for production rails apps.

I had an awful experience trying to get my rails app running on textdrive. It took several days for their support folks to get back to me when I had problems, their documentation has not been updated to reflect changes in their setup and they keep killing my rails and rake migration processes because they exceed the RAM usage limit. To top if off the mysql server randomly went down yesterday for 2 hours and I haven’t heard any info from them about the cause.

I couldn’t imagine using textdrive to host a production rails app.

(mt) is definitely struggling right now. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but we moved a couple Rails sites from an inhouse box to (mt) because we thought we knew what they were doing. Man, was that a mistake. Right about that time those GridServers started getting screwed.

Our main issue with (mt) at this point is the simple fact that they aren’t telling us anything. Nothing in the system status pages, nothing in the blog. We know they’re waiting to upgrade something, but they’ve supposedly upgraded several times.

I’ll also just add that we’ve had static html sites not working on (mt) also. So it’s not just rails.

We’re currently looking for a reliable and somewhat cost-effective way to host Rails sites. Be it a shared host, or a VPS. What really matters is that the sites work consistently.

Hi Joshua, I’m Maykel from SpeedyRails.com, I invite you to test our service, we offer 30 days money-back guarantee, so if you like our service then you stay, if not then we will give refund all your money. We are pride of having an easy to use and reliable Rails shared hosting service and very personal technical support (true 24/7)... we will always help you, no matter if the problem is in your sources!

I really like DreamHost and I’ve tried a bunch of other stuff in the past..

I like how you redirect your podcast.. nice

BTW, new code was released for DreamHost Referrals Optimization

I use Media72 Hosting and can’t recommend them highly enough. They really do go out of their way to help you and always know exactly how to fix problems with setting up sites on their service.

As a newbie to ROR and hosting companies for that matter, I have just realised that the hosting company (hosting365) do not support ROR and will not until at least September. This is too late for me. Is it possible to use Mongrel to deploy to a host server, will I have enough permissions etc. Also the hosting server is Windows 2000! Application is small with small usage it’s really a way of getting the application to my customer without having to go on-site to them.

I’ve been using Site5 and have also found their tech support to be responsive and helpful. Their control panel is easy to use and I like that I can manage everything through the proxy—lets me check my domains even when I am behind a firewall at work. It is mostly just a playground, no high traffic apps yet so I can’t speak to performance, but I have found it pretty easy to use so far.

This is a really helpful article. Thank you. I am looking into Ruby on Rails hosting and wondered if Dreamhosts offers were too good to be true. I am slightly put off now by performance issues – assuming i get some hits on my sites :-)

I am seriously considering Site5 at the moment. There $5 deal is crazy for the shared server and i havent read a bad word about them yet. Will look more into the shared server performance and Ruby though. Cheers people.

I know it is very pricey, but I am really surprised that no one has mentioned Engine Yard. There are some great minds behind this company, and some of your readers have to had experience with Engine Yard.

Anyone?

Thanks for that, Geoffrey! I am with Dreamhost (which is great for shared hosting by the way) but need to move to a VPS. Your site is the best resource that I’ve found so far. Thanks a lot!

I’ve heard mixed reviews about MediaTemple, but I also currently host static pages with them. I love the interface, support, and easy customization. Way better than bluehost. It’s probably the best control panel interface ever built. There are some ‘quirks’ about using the gridservice, which requires some special versions of the rails gem and other major gems, but they provide them for you. The ability to run containers is very specialized, they even wrote their own terminal command to manage each application. I had no trouble getting rails running along with their walkthrough tutorial. Apparently their rails setup is great as long as you’re not doing anything super special. Anybody I’ve seen having problems usually ends up getting a VPS. Oh, and unlike with bluehost (and other hosts), you get instant access to ssh once you signup. Overall, its the best option I’ve found without having a vps.

You can find great prices at WebTuga Hosting.

Check out Linode—we sponsored the Rails Rumble (http://railsrumble.com/) and recently increased the specs on our virtual servers: http://www.linode.com/

If you have dreamhost and use the PS. You can now use mongrel instead of fast cgi.

I’ve had good luck with HostingRails (http://hostingrails.com). I’ve got a number of shared accounts and a dedicated server for both professional and personal purposes yet I never see them in these kinds of lists.

Their tech support has always been super responsive and for the shared packages, you really have a lot of leeway. They seem to keep their servers from getting overloaded and will slap-down users who hog CPU cycles (as I inadvertently found out with a bad query).

I am looking at testing out an EC2 server to see how it goes, but I’ve really been happy with HostingRails.

(as a side note, they’ve got a number of great deployment tutorials for newbies and a forum where they quickly answer questions – even about ruby and rails questions)

I’ve tried Dreamhost and MediaTemple (Grid) for Rails hosting and found both ridiculously slow and impossible to customize.

I have instead been using HostingRails for about a year and a half and have found their service excellent and reliable. Their support team has also been very helpful. The easy mongrel setup with dedicated memory is a big plus for no-fuss quick-setup.

But for more serious sites that attract more visits I use SliceHost and can make no complaints. The only downside is that I have to do the server admin stuff myself (installing, setting up software, etc.). While that can also be an upside, for more basic sites, I’d rather not mess with it.

Your page is an excellent and unbiased resource for anybody looking for a Rails host. Thank you very much for providing this information!

I would avoid Site5 for now guys. Been having a lot of trouble with their uptime lately. It’s gone down 4 times this week so far.

You can see their own uptime reports here: http://www.site5.com/support/uptime.php

Most of them are under 99.5%, and some as low as 82%

Their support has been very helpful and courteous, but really if your website keeps going down every other day then none of this matters.

Avoid Site5!

I just wanted to pop back in and give some more thoughts on Slicehost. In my last comment I mentioned that the admin setup was more difficult. This is true, but they have a full set of excellent easy-to-follow tutorials that make setting up Rails hosting there a piece of cake.

HostingRails on the other hand has become less reliable for shared hosting. I regularly have mysql memory errors, slow response times, and my mongrel clusters get stuck and don’t always restart properly. They do now offer competitively priced VPS plans, but I’ve moved to Slicehost. and am very happy there.

Brian: Agreed on site5.com.

I am hosting an intensive Rails app there with RMagick thumbnails and lots of image files. I’ve had my fair share of problems with them. My pain and suffering in an easy to read list.

1. MySQL InnoDb DB hitting a hard limit at 100Meg. No ADDS for you!

2. Opps.. when doing server maintenance we screwed up the permissions on your home directory. Except, they didn’t say opps or even tell me about it. No site for you!

3. FastCGI processes routinely go undead and acquire a sudden taste for brains.

Site5 is a stinker. Host somewhere else.

Excellent resource, very helpful. Thanks!

I am a fan of ruby, but i have no idea how it works…such posts motivate me to learn more…thanks

Excellent resource, very helpful. Thanks!

I have a Dreamhost shared hosting account, and was very enthusiastic about Rails, so set about getting up to speed.

As I read through the learning material I had gathered, I was confident in the knowledge that my hosting company supported RoR.

However, when it came round to the actual deployment, I read lots of horror stories about the difficulty of deployment and the slowness on Dreamhost.

Since then, I’ve rather been put off by RoR, which is a shame. I’m now looking to adopt a PHP-based framework.

Thanks a lot, nice article…