I wonder how many of these recommendations are sponsorship-based. Linode is curiously missing in favor of Slicehost. Considering the recent discussion here regarding changes to Slicehost's pricing options, this seems like either a striking omission or an outright plug.
Hi retro, I tried to include companies that I had some experience with or that had been really recommended to me by people I trust. I use Slicehost for most of my sites, and I'm very happy with them, and that's why I included them. Some people say that Linode is just as good, or even better, but I haven't tried them first hand for anything Rails related. I actually mentioned Linode in the Slicehost paragraph, but didn't include them in the ordered list. Given the many mentions and recommendations (including Peter's below) I edited the post and included Linode along with Slicehost.
I know Antonio, no chances Linode is missing for something related to sponsorship. But indeed yes I think Linode is very worth to mention, as it works well and especially since Slicehost has not EU datacenters, while Linode provides UK datacenters. Really important if you want to deploy, for instance, for Italy.
I can't speak highly enough about Brightbox (the managed VPS service Antonio recommends).
Somehow they have managed to tread the fine line between a very comprehensive and well configured service with great addons (Comprehensive management Gem, load balancers, CDN and managed very high performance Master-Master MySQL cluster for all accounts) and flexibility (root access, install what you want on the boxes, no need to re-learn "their way" of server management).
I'd like them to add PostgreSQL and US locations in the future, but for a high-speed, reliable host they can't be beaten.
> there are countless stories of people who have had their domain taken down for “questionable reasons” by GoDaddy
There's no comment section on the original post, but can the author or anyone else provide links to specific and credible stories. Or at least elaborate on what “questionable reasons”, e.g. DMCA?
If you are going to go with an unmanaged host, I highly recommend buying your own servers and looking into colocation. If you are going to bother installing all the software yourself anyway, you'll get a much better price.
We were paying $800 a month for two high end servers at LayeredTech in Texas to handle our rails site (about 2M pageviews/day) We then bought two supermicro barebones servers and set up at a local co-location facility in Toronto.
The upfront cost of buying the servers (which were better than the ones we were renting) was $3500, but our monthly fees are now just $160. It didn't take long to pay for the server cost, and we'll have them around for as long as the hardware lasts (I expect it to be a while!).
Anyone tried HostGator? I'm wondering what kind of Rails hosting you're actually get for $5/month.
I'm using Dreamhost at the moment and my Rails app is crawling and barely usable.
Can't justify spending much on hosting at the moment, though, so HostGator sounds interesting if they don't throttle your resources as aggressively as Dreamhost seems to.
Never used hostGator, but hostmonster is way worse than dreamhost, fyi. In the end I built my own setup using a Rackspace Cloud.
I've also used mor.ph (like heroku) and just really don't like the restrictions that come by running on someone else's box and by their rules. Building a server up from scratch is not for the faint of heart, but can be very rewarding (and informative), not to mention cheap if you don't count your own time.
> _Please change the title to "My recommendations for Ruby on Rails hosting services that have affiliate programs."_
This seems a bit uncalled for. When did it become not OK to have referral ids in one's articles? There is nothing shady about this. The page clearly discloses the presence of affiliate links.
> _It's amazing how almost all the links are affiliate links._
3 hosting companies out of 9 have my referral id.
> _I had to look twice, since some of them do redirects so that it's not obvious from the final url that you've followed an affiliate link._
I use a plugin which prettifies links and provide statistics for each link (much better than Wordpress Stats does).
"3 hosting companies out of 9 have my referral id."
But the point is, you didn't disclose the role of commercial sponsorship in your "recommendations" until you were called on it.
Because this article smells like an advertorial and it is not clear whether you are representing our interests or your own, I think this raises two questions:
(1) Why should we take seriously any recommendations from this blog if there is such explicit commercial deference?
(2) How many older posts need to be revisited for commercial sanitization that we have not called to your attention?
They're not explicitly sponsoring the blog post they are merely hosting companies that he trust whom happen to also have affiliate schemes. Why not benefit from a post like this?
If I were to recommend or talk about books I'd most likely use afiliate links to Amazon. Is that really suc a big deal?
As a blogger, there's really not much cash to be made
to offset the time/money investment other than ads (which tech savy audiences are mostly blind to) or affiliate schemes.
If the affiliate links are disclosed I don't see the problem and am often willing to help those who produce valuable content.
As with anything your read on the net, you can choose to trust what you read or not. And you can further research it elsewhere. A critical mind is a good thing.
I like to think that most people here, and definitely my habitual readers, know me and trust me thanks to a solid reputation that I've built over the past few years.
If a prominent Django developer where to post a hosting article about Django, I wouldn't question his integrity just because some referral links were used. If I didn't trust what I read, I would simply not buy.
Back to your accusation of not disclosing my commercial sponsorship, I'll remind you of the disclosure posted from the get go:
"Disclosure: Some of the links above have my referral id. Pretty much any hosting site out there offers affiliate programs these days. Here I only report the Rails hosting sites I consider the best for you, regardless of the small commission I may get. By buying through these links, you get to support this site, and ensure its continued operation. At zero cost to you. Isn’t that nice of you? I feel a bit of love already. :)"
I think this makes where I coming from fairly clear. For example, I believe Slicehost gives you less than $10 for each person who buys from them through your referral. Do you have any idea how many hosting companies pay referral fees that are 5 to 10 times more than that? Yet, I wouldn't even dream of including them if I didn't know (directly or indirectly) that they were reliable.
To write this article, I first created a list of shared, vps and cloud providers I trusted. And only then did I check if I had an affiliate link to them (or if one was readily available). And it turns out that 3 out of 9 do.
The few spare bucks I may make, will help with the hosting fees (currently $85 a month) and the great investment of time I put towards blogging. Again, this is not shady.
You are of course free to choose not to trust what I write, or what I've written in the past.
To everyone else: I think we have beaten this horse to death already. I've made my position clear. If you don't concur, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I agree. For most people, Slicehost or Heroku are plenty (Slicehost being cheaper, but less Rails focused). Another good name is Linode. I've read somewhere, that people found them to be better, performance-wise, than Slicehost.
Linode is awesome. The CPU power you get is crazy compared to other providers I've tried. They don't seem to overload their host boxes. I just ditched a $250/mo dedicated server and got everything running on a $40/mo Linode with no hassles.
I'd love to hear some comments here on equivalent Django/Python solutions. I know of Webfaction and that's about it. I really want a Heroku for Django!
Does anybody have experience with scaling their Rails application on Dreamhost or Joyent? I have just started using Dreamhost VPSs with overall a good experience but have not reached the point where I start looking into scaling the app.
I see Linode and Heroku being recommended here a lot - will definitely explore them too.
Dreamhost shared hosting is some of the worst in the business, they oversell like crazy. Not sure how their VPS offering is, but in terms of price you will pay much less for the same VPS (on paper) from Linode. I've had great experiences with both Linode and Slicehost (using them almost equally for both small sites and a startup (schoolrack.com is hosted on a 4 cluster Slicehost setup). My vote is for Linode.
