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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.

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    You need to tell us your monthly budget, because everybody has different definition of inexpensive.
    – jpartogi
    Aug 20, 2009 at 4:32

9 Answers 9

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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.

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  • Heroku is built on top of EC2 and supports dreamy deployment - just push to a remote branch in your git repo. They also do a good job constraining your application in ways that ensure you'll be able to scale.
    – Luke Bayes
    Aug 20, 2009 at 12:23
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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.

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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  • I believe you meant Mosso in your first sentence.
    – theIV
    Aug 20, 2009 at 7:38
  • They actually just recently did away with the Mosso name and now call it "Rackspace Cloud Servers" Aug 20, 2009 at 13:29
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SliceHost is dirt cheap. Not rails-specific, though, and you have to do all the work.

My favorite is RailsMachine. Pretty cheap and they are really good at ruby/rails (they have some cool things out there: http://www.railsmachine.com/projects )

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Linode is an "infrastructure sponsor" for the Rails Rumble and provides VPSes (what's the plural for VPS?) to the teams.

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you should check out bluehost.

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I've heard good things about EngineYard.

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I've been using HostingRails, you can get a shared hosting plan for under $10 a month, but you'll need to pay for a year long contract upfront.

EDIT: just noticed the pay as you go option, which is billed monthly.

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I've been using Rackspace Cloud (used to be called Mosso) and went with the lowest plan. As for me this is cheaper than the majority of VPS. It's also much more flexible as I can setup my server the way I want it. It's kinda like VPS, only they charge you by hour. If I don't use my server, I can get a cheaper rate per month. I can also add another server on the fly with the bandwidth grows, something that you can not do with regular VPS. So with the flexibility and feature, I reckon that is really cheap.