hosting for rails

[Justin Collum]

I've got a rails app that I'd like to put up on a real live server next week. I'm checking out hosting and I thought the group might have some suggestions. My current contender is rackspace: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/. The mix of price and scalability looks good.

My needs: 

- Rails 3

- Ubuntu (just cuz) 

- Easy scaling

- Load balancing for prod deployment cutovers down the road (note that I've never actually done this, just heard that it's the right way to go) 

Anyone have a better suggestion? Price is a huge factor -- I'll be funding this myself for a while. 

[Eric Williams]

When I hear Rails I think Heroku or EngineYard as well as RackSpace

[Adron Hall]

In order of "low maintenance to higher maintenance".  All the costs are really close.

1. Heroku

2. EngineYard

3. AWS

4. Rackspace

5. Other cloud providers...  (pick your poison at this point ;)

You did mention you want to have Ubuntu, and from the sound of that you want to actually manage the machine instance. If that's the case you'll probably want to start with AWS or Rackspace. The price are pretty close, but if you aren't tied to Ubuntu, then dive into a free year of AWS. Run it on a Micro-instance, one can't beat free.  :)

-Adron

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Adron B Hall

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[Justin Collum]

Thanks Adron. 

I checked out the cost of SQL Server on Rackspace. Ouch. Per hour SQL Server Standard is more than a server with 8GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. I say again: ouch. 0.72/hr vs. 0.58. 

If I had built my app with SQL Server I'd be backing it out real quick right about now. 

Engine Yard does have this, which I find very appealing: 

We have the perfect way to get going. With just a name and email address, you can have your app up and running in minutes, and you’ll have up to 500 compute hours on a full-featured High-CPU Medium instance. You can even start and stop your instance as needed, enabling you to spread out your 500 hours over a period of up to 6 calendar months

[Adron Hall]

But you're building a rails app right? Which doesn't have SQL Server... so that shouldn't be a hindrance.

MS Products are rarely less expensive than the comparable products. Especially in cloud environments.

EngineYard really does have a great plan. Albeit, they aren't really cheap once you go full time deployed. Mainly because you end up paying for the PaaS over top of the AWS Services. Albeit the cool part, is it makes it easier to integrate all of that stuff or even use outlying services if you'd like. If you're site will have even a small amount of revenue, EngineYard is the way to go.  Also, they help alleviate data-center/geographic concerns that Heroku has.  (i.e. everything goes into East 1 regardless, and thus if East 1 has any issues, everything goes down without a direct plan to mitigate. You can deploy to any zone/region in EngineYard...  :)

Anyway, any other questions just let me know. I'll be deploying some other dev environments for a team via EngineYard later this month (or early December). That'll be an interesting experience that might parallel what you're trying to get up and running.

Cheers,

Adron

[Troy Howard]

Just to toss a couple more options out there...

If you want a completely DIY linux box on the "cloud", some other good
options are:

FSTServers Xen VPS Hosting
http://fstservers.com/plans/

Linode Xen VPS Hosting
http://www.linode.com/

I've used both of those, and you just get a plain-jane install of
Ubuntu with a root login, and a fixed monthly cost. They aren't beefy
instances, but they also aren't metered, and are quite cheap. I've
installed rails apps on both of those minimum instances and they run
fine.

While Linode starts around $20/month and only offers Unbuntu, the
capabilities of the instance are cheaper and comparable with Rackspace
and AWS.. FST allows Windows starting around 12.50 a month, and you
can easily blow away your ubuntu instance and turn it into a windows
instance whenever you want, or vice-versa. Very flexible, and
inexpensive for prototyping.

Also, if installing various services/infrastructure on Ubuntu is in
anyway new to you, the Linode Library of how-tos is awesome. It's a
great resource even if you're using a totally different hosting
system, because a lot of it is just general install/setup information,
and not specific to Linode.

Linode Library
http://library.linode.com/

Thanks,
Troy

[Justin Collum]

I've been attempting to deploy to EngineYard. Attempting, because I can't create an environment. They have support staff and the staff are working on it. Not being able to do something this basic is not giving me much faith in their service. I've attempted to create a new environment about 8 times, varying different parameters (region, MySql version, etc) with the same result every time. 

This is my takeaway on EngineYard so far: kinda flaky, basic services don't work. I'll keep going with it and let you guys know how it goes. 

[Adron Hall]

I'm curious (not that I've really had any issues with EngineYard yet...), but have you tried Heroku. Ironically, I still have a very hit or miss when deploying to Heroku and using their default Postgresql database service. ...and there is no way in hell I'm paying the $200 bucks a month or whatever for a dedicated Postgresql instance. If anything I keep defaulting and leaving out the activerecord stuff in Rails and going with Mongo.

In addition I must admit, if I'm going to do a standard multi-layer single node connected to a database application, I generally still use ASP.NET MVC w/ SQL Server and deploy to AppHarbor. But I haven't built an application like that in months.

Anyway, as always, curious about your architecture in relation to the app. I'm also curious as to why it is being difficult to deploy in EY.

-Adron

[Justin Collum]

I'm sticking to Martian Principle 16 here: Don't fail due to unexpected success. My impression of Heroku (which may be wrong) is that it is for small one-off apps. The app I'm building may blow up in that situation. 

I picked EngineYard because it seems more production ready and scalable than Heroku. Also I felt that I would be more able to reproduce the EngineYard setup locally and develop against it before deploying. 

Again, this might all be in my head. Sometimes you just have to pick between two things and it's not glaringly obvious which one is the right choice.  

[Adron Hall]

Naw, that's my experience also. EY does provide a better PaaS style deployment/control of options. Enables better control if things do blow up... way better than most other options on the market today.

-Adron

[Justin Collum]

I'm still wrestling with issues with EngineYard. I've got an app that has maybe 15 pages, most of which are static. I started a deploy last night and it took 4+ hours to fail and at the end the deploy the log said "No output". Started a new deploy this morning and got the same result. 

The good news is that EngineYard staff are very helpful and responsive. Plus, I'm not paying for this time, I still have 473 free hours. If I was paying for it I'd be unhappy. 

[Troy Howard]

Justin,

Have you considered applying for a job at EngineYard? Perhaps they
need some help to fix the problems you've identified.

In the open source world, when you find a bug, often the response from
the dev team on the project is "we'll get to that eventually, but if
you want to fix it yourself and send in a patch, that would be
awesome". You can take the same tack with the professional world --
offer to work somewhere as a means of patching. :)

Thanks,
Troy

[Justin Collum]

It's funny, I sat next to a guy from EngineYard at the last Ruby Newby meetup. 

As of about 10 mins ago my app is up and running on EngineYard. Very happy. The support staff was extremely helpful and patient.  Ran into a few situations where we never really figured out why it worked, just deployed a new tag. Ran into a few where their docs could be better. Ran into one where I messed up but it was buried in the logs and the staff helped me out. All in all, happy with how it went.