# Railsmachine? Good? **URL:** \ **Category:** Deployment\ **Created:** [March 19, 2007, 2:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312 "2007-03-19T14:00:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 2:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/1 "2007-03-19T14:00:07Z")
Hi: What does the community think about railsmachine as a service? Their service looks pretty good. Anyone had any good/bad experience? Mike ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 3:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/2 "2007-03-19T15:15:15Z")
On Mar 19, 2007, at 6:00 AM, Mike D. wrote: > Hi: > > What does the community think about railsmachine as a service? Their > service looks pretty good. Anyone had any good/bad experience? > > Mike Rails machine is a great service, I highly recommend them. Bradley know s his stuff and is the author of the mongrel\_cluster gem. Cheers- – Ezra Z. – Lead Rails Evangelist – removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid – Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting – (866) 518-YARD (9273) ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 3:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/3 "2007-03-19T15:20:16Z")
I’ve been using them since they launched. No problems, excellent customer service and very simple deployment method. I would highly recommend them. Harvey On Mar 19, 1:00 pm, Mike D. \ **Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2007, 7:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/4 "2007-03-20T07:26:12Z") Railsmachine++ I think you would be hard-pressed to find any complaints. Any questions that I have have been _promptly_ answered. They are great to work with. Adam G. ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2007, 7:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/5 "2007-03-20T19:12:22Z")
Another thumbs up fro railsmachine. Very happy so far… ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2007, 2:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/6 "2007-03-20T14:18:16Z")
Ditto to what everybody else has said - they’re great. The seemingly higher price than most other VPSs is more than offset by the piece of mind, stability and expertise of RM. ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2007, 7:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/7 "2007-03-22T19:08:40Z")
I’ve also been happy with Rails Machine. I started with one VPS and now have three. Bradley’s support has been terrific and the price/ performance for my needs is very good. Rails Machine provides excellent, independent VPS slices (or dedicated boxes). Their “cluster”, however, is just multiple of these, which it is up to you to configure. If you want fail-over, you need to set up DRBD to mirror the systems. The database runs on the same box as Apache/Mongrel in the standard Rails Machine setup. A three-VPS setup is around $200/month. Engine Y. takes this to another level. They have hardware load balancers, and the DB runs on its own cluster, mail on its own server, etc. You get better redundancy and load balancing without having to set all that up yourself. BUT - it is much more expensive. A three- slice setup (two for production, one for staging) at Engine Y. is $900/month. I’ve found that I had to learn a fair amount of Linux sysadmin to deal with the Rails Machine VPS effectively. I don’t know if there would be more or less of this needed with Engine Y… That’s what I’ve gleaned, in any case – Ezra, Bradley, please chime in if I’ve misunderstood any of this. Michael S. at Rails Machine: [www.mslater.com](http://www.mslater.com), www.newhorizonschool.info, [www.doyleparkfamilymedicine.com](http://www.doyleparkfamilymedicine.com) On Mar 19, 6:00 am, Mike D. \ **Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2007, 7:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/8 "2007-03-22T19:55:07Z") Michael- I think you are correct. RailsMachine is a great service if you want to admin your own VPS’s and configure things yourself. Bradley has written the railsmachine gem to make most of the setup easy as pie. Engine Y. on the other hand is more expensive but that is mainly because we are a fully managed end to end rails solution. This means that we manage every aspect of the servers and you don’t really have to ssh in ever if you don’t want to. Of course you do have ssh with sudo rights for when you do want to log in. When we setup an account we will get your svn repo and gems your app needs and fully configure and deploy your application before we deliver the keys to the slices and your custom deploy.rb file to you. So when you get the keys to your account, you can run cap deploy at will. Our setup is also fully clustered, meaning their is 2 or more of every single piece of hardware so everything is redundant right down to the power supplies. All slices live behind hardware load balancers that can handle the ssl decryption so your slice doesn;t have to. The db,mail, svn, dns and other services run in their own clusters and are managed by us so your slices only run your mongrel cluster and nginx. All that being said, I think RailsMachine is an awesome service, you will have a hard time finding better unmanaged rails vps’s then the ones at railsmachine. Cheers- – Ezra Z. – Lead Rails Evangelist – removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid – Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting – (866) 518-YARD (9273) ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2007, 8:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/9 "2007-03-24T20:08:48Z")
On Mar 22, 2007, at 12:08 PM, Luke F. wrote: > Regards, > > – > Luke F. Luke- The biggest difference is in the level of customer support. We are fully managed, meaning you don’t have to do any sysadmin work, just focus on writing your apps and let us worry about the deployment side. Also we are very tightly focused on Rails, our entire cluster architecture was built from the ground up with Rails in mind and is different from other offerings as a slice is more then just a virtual machine. The technical differences are there as well, accelerators run solaris, ey slices run our own custom gentoo linux build optimized for ruby. We use GFS for our shared filesystem which is posix compliant and doesn’t have locking issues like NFS does. Joyent’s accelerators are very nice and solaris has some compelling features, but the accelerators are only basic building blocks, you still have to plan your cluster, install and configure the packages yourself and admin them on your own or pay extra to get them to do it. EY is an end to end complete solution where everything needed for running rails apps in a clustered scale on demand environment is setup for you before you get access to your slices with your app already running. You don’t have to do any sysadmin work yourself if you don’t want, but you still have full ssh access with sudo rights if you like to be closer to the metal So if you have your own sysadmin type and you like solaris then the accelerators are a great option. But if you don’t want to keep a sysadmin on staff and you don’t want one of your developers spending a good portion of their time on sysadmin tasks then EY slices might save you some money. Good sysadmins are expensive so when you factor into the equation the money you will save by not needing one then our setup becomes very attractive. Cheers- – Ezra Z. – Lead Rails Evangelist – removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid – Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting – (866) 518-YARD (9273) – Ezra Z. – Lead Rails Evangelist – removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid – Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting – (866) 518-YARD (9273) ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 11:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/10 "2007-03-29T23:54:17Z")
Gotta give a big ++ for RailsMachine. Bradley is the man…I’ve had to learn some linux but it was necessary skills to learn ---
**Author:** ![miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@miked](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miked)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2007, 8:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/railsmachine-good/89312/11 "2007-03-22T20:16:12Z")
Ezra, that was a great post about what differentiates Engine Y. from a regular VPS hosting company. Can anyone talk about the difference between the Engine Y. and Joyent approaches? Judging from the web sites, Joyent Accelerators and Engine Yard slices seem similar. [http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/](http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/) > **[Engine Yard - PAAS Cloud - Cloud Platform as a Service for 2020](https://www.engineyard.com)** > > We're the 10-year leader in Ruby DevOps. You've got the apps. We've got the ops. Come for the Platform as a Service. Stay for the support. Regards, – Luke F. Ruby on Rails Developer Slantwise Design [http://slantwisedesign.com](http://slantwisedesign.com)