Railsmachine? Good?

Hi:

What does the community think about railsmachine as a service? Their
service looks pretty good. Anyone had any good/bad experience?

Mike

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
[email protected]
– Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

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. <ruby-forum-incom…@andreas-

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.

Another thumbs up fro railsmachine. Very happy so far…

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.

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, www.newhorizonschool.info,
www.doyleparkfamilymedicine.com

On Mar 19, 6:00 am, Mike D. <ruby-forum-incom…@andreas-

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
[email protected]
– Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

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
[email protected]
– Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

– Ezra Z.
– Lead Rails Evangelist
[email protected]
– Engine Y., Serious Rails Hosting
– (866) 518-YARD (9273)

Gotta give a big ++ for RailsMachine. Bradley is the man…I’ve had to
learn some linux but it was necessary skills to learn

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/

Regards,


Luke F.
Ruby on Rails Developer
Slantwise Design http://slantwisedesign.com