Searching for Good Rails Hosting
I am looking for a simple Ruby on Rails hosting provider because running FastCGI on Dreamhost has proven to be everything but fast. I had a quick look at some servers that offer Mongrel instances, but these tend to too expensive as you pay a lot per instance. I want to play around with more than one app, so renting more than one Mongrel instance (you can only run one app per server) is not an option.
I had a look at some hosting providers and decided to give HostingRails.com a try. They seemed to be very Rails oriented, cheap ($3.59 a month) and offered an easy upgrade to Mongrel if this would ever be necessary. Setting up a FastCGI app on their server was easy and much faster than DreamHost. I really don’t get what is wrong with the FastCGI on Dreamhost!
Unfortunately they use cPanel, which places the root of any subdomain as a folder in the main domain. This is just plain stupid and most other hosting providers make different Document Roots for every (sub)domain. Lucky for me they have a 30-day money back option which I opted for, so no money lost. I am having a look now at Site5 ($5 per month for quite a lot more) but I am first mailing them to see how they handle subdomains. They have a 60 day money back guarantee, so I will probably be trying them out next week. I hope that this one works properly as I want to get some apps up and running.
Personally I use Steel Pixel who have a number of hosting options starting at $4/month.
They are just a small operation that have cleverly sold a number of limited lifetime hosting packages as opposed to taking venture capital. I believe they have the numbers correct, fingers crossed. If you are quick and fancy a flutter then they are offering another 10 lifetime packages to expand the current hardware.
In fairness they are not as solid as some hosting companies, but better than others, and if there is a problem you can send an email that is actually read and actioned quickly.
Thanx for the tip. I had a look at Steel Pixel, but their disk storage is a bit limited. Furthermore I rather test and then buy than having to buy a lifetime contract directly ;).
I am looking at Site5 now, but they haven’t responded to my support email yet.