Cheapest way to host low-traffic small-footprint Rails app?

Ruby
1

I have a commercial Radiant-based website that I manage for a small-
business client. They pay me a flat annual fee to do so, but lacking
any other clients to split the cost between (and I have no plans of
getting more), their fee doesn’t cover the entire cost of the hosting
service I use for it.

What recommendations do others have for low-cost Rails hosting?

2

Heroku. You can’t get better than free, but the basic plan is probably
too
small for anything except prototypes and experiments.

The first paid plan however is quite cheap however, and Rails apps are a
snap to deploy with them.

3

On Oct 6, 2011, at 8:53 AM, Phillip G. wrote:

…
2) Take a look at Dreamhost’s offerings.

+1 for Dreamhost

Unlimited sites, users, mysql databases, etc for under $10/month.
They are a substantial operation. Last I heard: 300,000 customers
on 4,000 servers. But don’t expect any hand-holding from their staff.
Given the low rent, you are essentially on your own.
They have a wiki and a set of forums. But both are pretty weak.

Dan N.

4

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Intransition [email protected]
wrote:

What recommendations do others have for low-cost Rails hosting?

  1. This is a question best answered by the Rails community.

  2. Take a look at Dreamhost’s offerings.

–
Phillip G.

gplus.to/phgaw | twitter.com/phgaw

A method of solution is perfect if we can forsee from the start,
and even prove, that following that method we shall attain our aim.
– Leibniz

5

On Oct 6, 2011, at 9:58 AM, Viaduct Productions wrote:

What do people consider “cheap”? You want scalability? Support?

Dreamhost and similar hosting providers come with a price of things going down
from time to time. You get what you pay for.

Agree about support. Very no-frills.

Agree about scalability.
But the question specified “low-traffic small-footprint”.

Disagree about reliability. I don’t know about other vendors
but I’ve used Dreamhost for 5+ years and haven’t had a serious
downtime issue … yet.

Dan N.

6

What do people consider “cheap”? You want scalability? Support?

Dreamhost and similar hosting providers come with a price of things
going down from time to time. You get what you pay for.

Cheers

Rich in Toronto

7

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 6:47 AM, Intransition [email protected]
wrote:

I have a commercial Radiant-based website that I manage for a small-
business client. They pay me a flat annual fee to do so, but lacking
any other clients to split the cost between (and I have no plans of
getting more), their fee doesn’t cover the entire cost of the hosting
service I use for it.

What recommendations do others have for low-cost Rails hosting?

If you like complete control, for about $10/month you can get a 256MB
cloud server from Rackspace.

8

On Oct 6, 2011, at 10:42 AM, Steve K. wrote:

Dreamhost stores your passwords in plain text, and considers it a feature.

Yes, that is bad. I’ve chosen to live with it and not put anything
there that I wouldn’t post publicly.

Thanks for mentioning this. I’ll remember to do so in the future.

Dan

9

Dreamhost stores your passwords in plain text, and considers it a
feature.

10

On Oct 6, 8:51am, Richard C. [email protected] wrote:

Heroku. You can’t get better than free, but the basic plan is probably too
small for anything except prototypes and experiments.

The first paid plan however is quite cheap however, and Rails apps are a
snap to deploy with them.

Of course, I would love to use Heroku if I could, but I looked at
pricing and came up with a $36/mo minimum, which is too much of this.
But maybe I misunderstand it?

11

I’ll be the emissary here :-d

I’m a DH employee and I can assure you we do not store PT passwords; we
do send PT over email for certain things though. I’ve been informed that
said emails are being addressed as we speak.

If you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them for you (I work
in Operations/Engineering not Customer Service).

12

Agree about support. Very no-frills.
no frills maybe, but they have always answered any question I had with
reasonable delay. Consider me satisfied. (I don’t work there, longtime
customer).

13

+1 for dreamhost. any question i’ve ever had has been answeres in less
than 24h. i host several low traffic client sites there. haven’t
deployed rails, but others have and their support is, imo, pretty good.
someone on this mailing list would probably not need much hand holding
if deploying to DH.

Sent from my finger. Forgve typoos

14

What recommendations do others have for low-cost Rails hosting?

I use bluehost with fcgi, which works (after about a day of figuring out
how to get it setup), though they kill your fcgi processes after like 30
seconds of inactivity, you can have several rails apps. Not really
recommended, but pretty cheap.

15

lowesthosting.com charges about $5/month for hosting, email addresses
etc. I have been using them for years and am happy with them

16

+= on the rackspace.

You can also weigh your options in Amazon ec2.

17

On Oct 6, 2011, at 7:37 PM, brettg wrote:

…
I’m a DH employee and I can assure you we do not store PT passwords; we do send
PT over email for certain things though. I’ve been informed that said emails are
being addressed as we speak.
…

Please ignore the following if you don’t care about dreamhost.com.

Since several other folks on the list also seem to be dreamhost
customers,
I’ll risk belaboring this point and summarize things as I understand
them
given a couple of recent exchanges with various dreamhost staff -

  1. At issue are web control panel passwords and not linux user
    passwords.
  2. Passwords for the web control panel are saved with two-way
    encryption.
    A password is decrypted and and emailed to the user in plain text if
    the
    user clicks on the “forgot password” link.
  3. Customers can individually contact customer service and ask that
    their
    passwords be expunged from the encrypted file.
  4. As mentioned above, dreamhost seems to have recognized that the
    current
    password recovery system is a problem and is in the process of fixing
    it.

Dan N.

18

Hello,

I don’t want to start any flames or drive the topic “out of” but… I’ve
had dreamhost for about 3 years and I had to leave because the support
was bad.

My website got banned by google because it was hosted in the same server
with some infected websites (same public IP). Then I discovered than
even my wordpress installation was infected and it was not from
‘outside’. Someone probably had hacked their server.

All I was getting were tickets and pretty lame support tech’s telling
things I’ve already had done on my own more than 4 times in a row. I had
to change to a smaller, Greek web-hosting company, which is driven by
two “UNIX freaks” who offer pretty ‘serious’ support and are at the same
price. I won’t mention them here, it’s not an ad or something. Just want
to point out that huge web providers like Dreamhost offer lots of
possibilities, but this flexibility at that price comes… with a
price.

Best Regards,

+1 for Heroku.