Off-topic: Rails hosting

Rails
1

All,

I’ve been looking switching hosting providers, and have been strongly
considering TextDrive. Doing a little Googling turns up a fair
number of complaints that seem to be centered around server
performance, stability and uptime. Since I know a poorly written app
can contribute to all of these, I thought I’d pose the question to
all of you. Does anyone here host with TextDrive? Any input, good
or bad? If this is too off-topic, please feel free to reply just to me.

Thanks,

Sean

2

Hi Sean.
There’s been a bit of discussion along similar lines on this list
recently. The performance is less to do with Textdrive and more that
you’re sharing your server with other (often badly optimised) rails
apps.

A VPS seems the best solution. Personally I’m with Rimuhosting who
have been very good so far, I’ve seen others recoemmend a company
called Bytemark. I’m sure others on this list will have other
recommendation too.

Ross

3

Sean B. wrote:

I’ve been looking switching hosting providers, and have been strongly
considering TextDrive. Doing a little Googling turns up a fair
number of complaints that seem to be centered around server
performance, stability and uptime. Since I know a poorly written app
can contribute to all of these, I thought I’d pose the question to
all of you. Does anyone here host with TextDrive? Any input, good
or bad? If this is too off-topic, please feel free to reply just to me.

Save yourself a headache and go with a VPS. Linode, Rimuhosting,
VPSLand are all good choices. I was with Textdrive for a while and it
was a nightmare from day one. Not sure how anyone could say something
potsitive about them. Their tech support was slow, the servers were
down more than they were up, etc. And as far as the problem being
people’s poorly coded Rails apps to blame — well that would be
TEXTDRIVE needing to monitor and prevent those incidents rather than
letting the same people haul down the server. Their solution was the
typical Windows server solution: Reboot. I’ve since gone to a VPS and
have been very happy.

4

I have, without a doubt, been miserable on TextDrive. Worst service and
support I’ve ever had. My company has directly suffered due to
downtime
of many hours. I’m trying to pick a VPS service myself and do the
switch
early next week.

5

If good support and stability is what you are after, look no further
than RailsPlayground.

Heh, I sound like a commercial.

They have excellent support, and great prices. I have zero complaints.
Their forums are actively monitored and they are constantly improving
the service.

6

Since everyone else is suggesting a VPS, I’m going to suggest Rails
Machine. It’s a VPS that comes with all the basic rails necessities
pre-installed (Apache, Mongrel, MySQL), as well as the powerful rails
machine deploy tasks. These tasks extend capistrano and place even
more constraints on the server. But, I managed to deploy my Rails Day
app on it (Apache mod_proxy_balancer and 2 clustered mongrels)
during the competition in about 30 minutes by following Brad’s
instructions.

If you don’t go with them for whatever reason, definitely look into
setting up a similar environment with the Rails Machine gems.

7

Carl F. wrote:

If good support and stability is what you are after, look no further
than RailsPlayground.

Heh, I sound like a commercial.

They have excellent support, and great prices. I have zero complaints.
Their forums are actively monitored and they are constantly improving
the service.

I second that. Best provider I’ve been with so far. And nice friendly
(fast) support (did me _'s in my subdomains).
My app runs fine for me. (Funny to see though how it runs faster when
america sleeps (yes I live in Europe)).

Torsten

8

+1 for Rimuhosting. Just make sure you know what you’re doing.

9

And I don’t even have my Rails application up and running yet. This has
been downtime for all http and ssh requests.