Ruby on Rails Hosting

5 hosts that support Rails and the exact service level you should expect

Want your host to offer service with a smile? There are many Rails developers looking for a place to host their applications, and there are increasingly more hosting companies that “support” Rails. However, not all hosts are created equal. This is most clearly seen in their support teams. Not all support teams offer the same level of service. We have made a list of 5 hosts we think you should make note of who support Rails, and the service level you can expect from them. Keep in mind this is not a complete list of hosts that support Rails, just 5 that we think you should pay attention to for support quality and attention to Rails customers.

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The funding behind 6 top Ruby on Rails hosts

Starting a new company? Ever wonder where your Rails host got its start? We looked into the backgrounds of several top Rails hosts to find out what started the machine, and what keeps it greased. It’s interesting to note that most (if not all) of the bigger hosting companies don’t have much financial history information readily available.

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Heroku releases its “Celadon Cedar” stack into public beta

Heroku is a leading Ruby on Rails hosting provider that prides itself on having a focused, easy to use and reliable service for hosting Rails. Heroku is excited to announce that as of June 1st, 2011 they are releasing their new Cedar stack into public beta. The new version of Heroku has previously been tested in alpha and private beta by hundreds of developers and Heroku customers. It is now ready for a public beta.

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Top 5 free tutorials for beginning Ruby on Rails developers

Just getting into developing with Rails? Are you wanting to learn more about how to put together a Rails application? We looked and found the top five most up to date free tutorials for developing with Ruby on Rails. If you’re looking to learn more about coding with Ruby on Rails or just looking to find some good tutorials to brush up on your basics then bookmark these pages for easy reference.

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Why you should want a Ruby on Rails host that is in the news.

In the last few weeks there has been a lot of news coming from the Rails Hosting community. To name just a few: the Engine Yard and Aquio partnership, the announcement of the new Cedar stack available at Heroku, and the launch of the Rails 3.1 release candidate and the lack of hosts ready to test and subsequently add it to their services. The truth is that you need a hosting company that stays in the news for being innovative and building their company. Otherwise you will likely be sitting with a company that probably doesn’t pay attention to the growth of the language and the wildly, apparent growing needs of its development community. Most likely, (just read a few of the reviews on less notable hosting solutions) they won’t be able to keep up with service needs. Eventually those stagnant companies will fall away and only the companies willing to grow will be left.

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Top 5 hosts for beginning Rails developers

Looking for a place to host your first Rails app? Maybe you just have no idea what to look for in a host. If you are a developer who is just starting out with Rails then you need to know a few things. First, a lot of hosts don’t know what they are doing when it comes to supporting Rails. Second, a lot of hosts just flat don’t support the framework at all. With many hosts you really have to do your homework to make sure that your hosting experience will be a success. We have compiled a list of 5 hosting companies that are worthwhile for developers who are just starting out and are looking for a place to host their first applications.

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Free Rails hosting?

If you’re out there looking for a Ruby on Rails version of free PHP hosting, there are a few options to choose from.Your first choice is going to be Heroku. They are the absolute leader in free Rails hosting. Their free plan offers a single dino and shared server space to get you up and running for free. The free tier works well for staging, testing, and running small apps. If your app grows and you get a ton of traffic the option to upgrade to a paid plan is simple and hassle free. Your second choice is HelioHost. The free plan from HelioHost includes "unlimited" bandwidth and .25GB of disk space, as well they offer Mongrel, Passenger, and Rails 3.0.3. HelioHost does not however offer SSH or the ability to run more than four applications on one plan. Third, check out AlwaysData. The free plan from AlwaysData offers .1GB of disk space, and 1GB bandwidth. AlwaysData's free plan also comes with restrictions such as forbidding the use of your account for profit and using your account for hosting proxies. Some companies will also occasionally offer one year of free Rails hosting in lieu of another year (or so) of paid hosting service on contract. HostingRails is one such company. They are currently offering one free year when you sign up for a "stacked", shared hosting plan. The price moves up to $7.95 a month after the first year of service and the starter plan offers the use of Mongrel, Passenger, 10GB of disk space and 100GB of bandwidth.

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Hosting reviews: Heroku

Here at Railshosting.org our goal is to bring you the most up to date information in the world of Rails hosting. Whether that's uncovering news stories, bringing you great lists of tutorials, top hosts, or giving you the information you need to make the best choice possible to host your app. In an effort to bring you the most up to date information we've decided to crowd-source some of our information and bring you hosting reviews of some of our top hosts. These posts will feature just one host and will give you a plethora of pros and cons to weigh your decision against. As is expected the reviews contained in these articles are not the opinions of Railshosting.org. Instead it's the voice of the internet, those that have gone before you that speaks on these posts. We hope that their experiences, good or bad, will aid you in your journey to build and deploy the application of your dreams.

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Platform as a service, why should you use it for Rails hosting?

With companies like Engine Yard and Heroku offering great cloud service for Ruby on Rails developers, its hard, if not impossible to peer into the world of Rails hosting without hearing something about a company that provides cloud PaaS hosting, and the surrounding benefits. In case you haven't however, in an effort to be your go to source for all things Rails hosting related, we are going to take a look at the benefits of hosting with a company that provides Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud services.

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Heroku is Not for Beginners

Sure, like a drug dealer, they give you a little bit for free. But, how good is the stuff?

Heroku's main appeal is to take away the DevOps hassles and allow developers to "git push production" and not worry about what happens after the (insanely slow) deploy process. But, like most things in life, if it's too good to be true, then...yep, it's not true.

Heroku: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The Good:

See your app live on the Net for free.

Easily "heroku ps:scale web=10" to scale out your web tier or workers

Don't have to worry about log rotations, updating server software, creating your own deploy scripts, etc...

The Bad:

Once you get up and running a few dynos and workers, with a reasonable database, it's NOT cheap (i.e. you are spilling hundreds at this point).

Connectivity issues between dynos and third party services (e.g. Amazon S3) is too often unreliable.

Meet Virginia. Your web servers are forced into Amazon's Virginia datacenter, which is a serious problem if you need to target a specific area of the world to get faster speeds.

The Ugly:

TIMEOUT ERROR (And connection refused) HELL. Too many H12s and H18s for comfort. It's a nightmare for some apps.

CPU LIMITING. Heroku packs a gazllion of their dynos, presumably, onto large Amazon virtual server instances. When you are virtualizing an already-virtualized environment, you are going to run into CPU issues. We have seen requests that take 6 seconds only because they were allotted a total of 1 second of CPU time, over spurts, in that interval.

TOO MANY BLACK BOXES. You loose waaaaay to much customizability (and thus performance) when too many parts of your DevOps are behind the scenes.

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