Review of Rails web hosting services

Hi guys,

If you’re in need of or considering a web hosting service for Rails,
check this out:
http://web2withrubyonrails.gauldong.net/rails-hosting/

Should you want to add your own experience and/or favorites, feel free
to do so. :slight_smile:

Hope this helps someone.


Hendy I.
Web: http://hendy.gauldong.net
Mobile: +62 856 24889899
Yahoo Messenger: ceefour666
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ceefour

Hendy I. wrote:

…aww, you didn’t review us. :-p

Robby


Robby R.
http://www.robbyonrails.com/

Dear Robby,

On 2/9/07, Robby R. [email protected] wrote:

…aww, you didn’t review us. :-p

Robby

My bad… :slight_smile:

I knew about Planet Argon a long time ago actually, it was one of the
first Rails hostings (and I heard you were the first brave person
running Typo on PostgreSQL :-). I was turned down of it because of
cheaper offers (then went with HostingRails, hehe, sorry but I’m just
being honest).

Pre-judging by the price, Planet Argon seems to be driving more on
overall quality and customer happiness (not just satisfaction) rather
than “impressive space/storage/etc.” Is this true? I’d like to know
what sets Planet Argon apart from [cheaper] services… I’d love to add
your service to my list, so you’ll help inform our community better.
:slight_smile:


Hendy I.
Web: http://hendy.gauldong.net
Mobile: +62 856 24889899
Yahoo Messenger: ceefour666
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ceefour

I’m a customer of Robby’s. I have a rails (http://
www.actionshootingscores.com) running with a mongrel cluster behind
pound and apache on PlanetArgon’s shared ion server. I also have a few
trivial static html web sites there too ( hey they needed a home :slight_smile: )

The PanetArgon folks know rails, making it easy to communicate when
there’s a tech support issue. I have been happy with the service. Most
times my app runs well, even zippy. Sometimes not but this is a fact
of life with shared hosting. I have had a couple of “bad neighbor
problems” where another app hogs the cpu, slowing down all others.
Generally PA gets right on this but I have had one occasion when it
took too long for them to deal with it. I suspect this will happen on
any shared host.
On the negative side, the ion server was down for a few DAYS right
after Christmas - not at all good.

I have tried one other host, Site5. They are great for static html
sites, but my rails app just sucked there. They offer FastCGI only, no
mongrel. My biggest problem was the connection to mySQL would fail and
then the app was down - with way no for me to know it failed other
than someone getting an http 500 error. This happened often, sometimes
I could recover by killing all the fastcgi processes, other times I
had to ask their tech support. They were cheaper than PlanetArgon,
until you put a cost on a down app.

In general, shared hosting is not a good way to run a production
application that gets a lot of use. It is OK for a lightly used app.

Dagny Gromer

Hendy I. wrote:

I knew about Planet Argon a long time ago actually, it was one of the
first Rails hostings (and I heard you were the first brave person
running Typo on PostgreSQL :-). I was turned down of it because of
cheaper offers (then went with HostingRails, hehe, sorry but I’m just
being honest).

Pre-judging by the price, Planet Argon seems to be driving more on
overall quality and customer happiness (not just satisfaction) rather
than “impressive space/storage/etc.” Is this true?

Exactly. Rails hosting shouldn’t fall into the same cheap php hosting
environment. Tons of storage isn’t going to solve your Rails deployment
problems. If you need more disk space, we can always customize a
package… but actually recommend that you find yourself a cheap host
(amazon s3 for example) for tons of disk space. If you need it for your
database… you shouldn’t be looking at shared hosting anyways.

I’d like to know

what sets Planet Argon apart from [cheaper] services… I’d love to add
your service to my list, so you’ll help inform our community better.
:slight_smile:

I haven’t used the other services, but I know that we have many
customers that have. Almost all of our employees are developing Rails
applications on a daily basis… so we think like developers. Most of
our customers… are developers. They want more control over their
deployment solution, so we give it to them… because it’s what we want.
as well. :wink:

We’re also huge PostgreSQL fans (I’ve been working with PostgreSQL for
several years before Rails was even around…) and we let you run your
own private instance of it. I don’t think most of the other rails
environments give you that flexibility (currently).

But, like I said. I haven’t used any other rails hosting company because
we started offering hosting for Rails just over two years ago now… and
I’m happy with my current provider. :wink:

Robby


Robby R.
http://www.robbyonrails.com/