Hosting with email accounts?

Heroku seems to have pretty much become the standard for Rails apps just
starting out. Any time anyone asks which is the best host, the answer
always seems to be Heroku.

But, correct me if I’m wrong, Heroku does not include email accounts
with their service?

Most ‘traditional’ shared hosts also let you set up email accounts for
your domain, but I don’t see anything like that on Heroku. Their plan is
basically for just hosting your site. I also need email accounts.

Is there a solution for this for Heroku? I imagine if there is, it’s not
free, or involves hosting emails elsewhere.

If not, then what is the best cheap host (this is just a portfolio site,
no heavy traffic) that INCLUDES email accounts as well?

Thanks

don’t use heroku, but at least in Germany there are virtual root servers
with full DNS control and integrated mail servers for less than 15 USD
(10
Eur) a month.

They are also powerful enough to run a few rack apps.
Am 26.11.2012 02:36 schrieb “Alexander DiMauro” [email protected]:

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Norbert M. [email protected]
wrote:

don’t use heroku, but at least in Germany there are virtual root servers
with full DNS control and integrated mail servers for less than 15 USD (10
Eur) a month.

Because you can’t get the same thing in the US, UK, Australia, Insert
your country here.

Sorry, wasn’t meant to be imperative, there is missing a simple “I”, I
can’t now about the prices in the whole world but in Germany. So I wrote
that this applies to Germany. I still hoped that there are similar
offers
all over the world, because I often realized that in hosting not really
the
amount to pay differs, but the actual performance of the hosting
service.
Am 26.11.2012 15:59 schrieb “Jordon B.” [email protected]:

After a little more searching, I discovered webfaction.com which seems
pretty good in terms of Rails support.

Most of the reviews I read were really good, the occasional issue which
all hosts will have, but far fewer than most. Plus a 60 day refund
policy, so I may just try them out.

Anyone else have experience with Web Faction?

On Nov 25, 9:36pm, Alexander DiMauro [email protected] wrote:

Most ‘traditional’ shared hosts also let you set up email accounts for
your domain, but I don’t see anything like that on Heroku. Their plan is
basically for just hosting your site. I also need email accounts.

Is there a solution for this for Heroku? I imagine if there is, it’s not
free, or involves hosting emails elsewhere.

Unless you’re doing stuff like automatically processing email sent to
you, there’s no reason not to host your email completely separately
from your web apps. In particular google will host your email for free
(and provide a gmail web interface to it) for up to 10 users (beyond
that you’ll have to pay). All you have to do is sign up for the
service and point your domain’s mx records at their servers. Your
actual applications can be wherever you want.

Fred

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Norbert M. [email protected]
wrote:

Sorry, wasn’t meant to be imperative, there is missing a simple “I”, I can’t
now about the prices in the whole world but in Germany. So I wrote that this
applies to Germany. I still hoped that there are similar offers all over the
world, because I often realized that in hosting not really the amount to pay
differs, but the actual performance of the hosting service.

VPS.Net offers servers for around $20 a month starting, they are all
over the world (so it’s somewhat good for the price they offer but I
can’t comment on them for personal reasons). Amazon’s cheapest server
runs about $15 a month (though they are in selective markets outside
of the US, Western Europe and Asia, in mid-Europe they are pretty
spread out leaving much to be desired for fast connections.)

Heroku’s problem is not price, it’s a good price for the
infrastructure you get (to a certain extent until the math breaks your
wallet) the problem is the infrastructure itself, and not directly
related to the infrastructure but to the location of it, it’s a single
location in a single point and I don’t know if they ever plan to
branch out into other markets making their service even more price
worthy. It’s easy to scale out, it’s hard to scale out across the
world unless you get all pro like Cloudflare did and trick out the
deployment methods you use but not many people think like they do when
it comes to scaling.

Lots of hosting providers start at or around $15-$20. I would look
more at their infrastructure and the problems they have with it before
I look at the price. For example with Heroku the problem comes down
to a single location, eventually you’ll want your own infrastructure,
probably long before you care about the price. In the past certain
other providers had huge problems with their storage. With
Mediatemple you’ll eventually get pissed off at the root access but
lack of access to the Kernel (unless they changed that since I was
there testing.) At Amazon you’ll probably think you’re okay until you
realize there are better ways if you can get it right (but again that
is hard to do so for most it’s just not worth the initial cost to do
it right since there could be a huge margin of error depending on your
team.)

At other hosting providers you might do great for a while then when
you end up having an IO heavy site, you get tore down and end up
killing the entire hypervisor so you get killed by them so you move to
Amazon and then get hit with huge IO costs (because IO costs there,
and it can cost a lot depending on what type of IO you want and how
much of it you want to secure) so then you end up thinking about
scaling into your own hardware but again that’s hard to do right if
you want to spread out and not remain in a single location which
brings you back to a Heroku like situation.

So for me it always comes down to how much IO costs, how much can I
secure and how much is that premium IO going to cost me and whether or
not the company that is going to be hosting me or my clients can
handle that IO or if they are used to tailoring to sites that think
they need a VPS but really don’t or just have it for security reasons
but don’t really need the full power.