Rails Hosting is Expensive

May 10th, 2007 by pyrat

In my experience, to serve rails applications reliably you need to be running them with a static instance. (a process which runs all the time). Commonly this is one or more mongrel or fastcgi processes.

The problem is that this uses quite a bit of server resource so not many account can exist in a shared hosting environment.

On top of this, its recommended to be on a shared server with limited accounts or even better a Xen based VPS such as railsmachine

The problem with these solutions is that they are quite expensive for the cheap ass developer (me!). Shelling out something in the region of £30 per month to host 2-3 rails applications is quite a lot of money when its likely that they wont be making any.

I may have to bite the bullet and start paying for a VPS but in the meantime does anyone have any recommendations for cheap, reliable rails hosting which is going to give me a few static instances?

2 Responses to “Rails Hosting is Expensive”

  1. Jack Says:

    Check out HostingRails.com – I’m running a load-balanced mongrel cluster of two for like $13USD / mo – you have to shell out a year in advance…but its worth it.

  2. pyrat Says:

    That looks pretty good. However Im now thinking about definitely taking the route of a VPS. Slicehost looks great for this but there is a huge waiting list as VPS’s seem to be the new cool.

    So are there any VPS solutions out there that are competitive with slicehost specs and prices?

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