VPS for development and testing

[Chris Kottom]

Hi all,

I'm on the lookout for an upgrade to my current hosting solution.
Currently I'm running on a basic shared hosting package for around $10
a month, and it's all right for what I'm doing, but I would like to
have a little more control over what's installed, infrastructure
software configuration, etc. I'm thinking about upgrading to a
virtual private server. (Haven't decided on a provider yet, but
considering a number of options based on recommendations from
friends.) I would expect to run MySQL or Postgres + lighty or Mongrel
+ possibly Apache on the very front-end, and on top of that stack, I
would be running a wiki and a number of projects (mostly PHP and
Rails) in various states of development. Assuming relatively low
traffic, I'm trying to determine what kind of sizing (RAM + CPU) I
would need as a minimum in order to ensure reasonable performance with
all this running in parallel.

Thanks.

[Amster Jason]

SInce it's virtual, can't you just start with the smallest/cheapest package and add on to  it as you go?  That would be my strategy as in the beginning you'll probably only need the very basic setup and as you add more apps/traffic you scale.  If i'm not mistaken, that's the beauty of VPS.  Also, can you share some of the recommendations that you received?  I too have been looking around but I don't know anyone currently using any service right now who can vouch.

Good Luck & Thanks,

Jason

Jason Amster
C: 732 991 0907
E: jam...@gmail.com
W: http://blog.jayamster.com

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[Robert Dempsey]

Hey guys,

We have had great luck with Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com/) for
low-cost development servers. For production, we have many clients on
Railsmachine (http://www.railsmachine.com), which starts at $75. With
Slicehost, it will be up to you to install and configure everything.
Railsmachine VPSes come pre-configured with Ruby, Apache, MySQL, and
many gems. They also have a gem you can use and be 100% up and running
in 30 minutes or less.

Let us know what you decide.

Sincerely,

Robert Dempsey, Project Director
Atlantic Dominion Solutions, LLC
http://www.techcfl.com

phone: 321.274.4684
fax: 321.214.3352
Get Linked In :: http://www.linkedin.com/in/techcfl
Twitter :: http://twitter.com/rdempsey
Ruby Zone:: http://ruby.dzone.com/users/robertdempsey

[Dave Stevenson]

Hi Chris -

I've found that generally a Rails site works best on a VPS plan with a minimum of 256mb of RAM.  Once you get MySQL, Apache, and a couple of Mongrel's loaded, you'll be up over 128mb.  The CPU should be less important as a lot of VPS hosting providers guarantee a minimum share, but allow you to burst to the full CPU speed if cycles are available.  Self Plug Here:  SilverRack keeps their boxes running with a "top" of less than 1, so you're pretty much going to get the full CPU speed anytime you need it.

Regards,
Dave
Affordable VPS Hosting
http://www.silverrack.com

[russellc]

I'm looking to upgrade from shared hosting to root too (EngineYard
slices are more than I need at the moment though). I signed up for a
free FB Joyent accelerator but lost it due to inactivity because I
didn't get around to doing anything with it in time. Joyent has the
"step above shared hosting" at a price that I want but it's Solaris
based, so that might limit some stack options due to OS. nginx for
example claims to be tested against Solaris but I don't know about
others. I'd be interested in hearing opinions good/bad or otherwise
about Joyent or any other solution.

Thanks a lot,
RC

[David Parker]

I'd also recommend Slicehost. They have a ~$20/month 256MB package
which is good for learning, etc. You also get into the nitty-gritty
as you'll learn to set it all up via command line, which is good for
those of us that didn't already know how.

I'd also recommend checking out nginx as your webserver. It leaves a
much smaller memory footprint than Apache.

Regards,

David Parker
Ideally LLC
http://davidwparker.com

On Feb 17, 8:39 am, Robert Dempsey <robertonra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> We have had great luck with Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com/) for
> low-cost development servers. For production, we have many clients on
> Railsmachine (http://www.railsmachine.com), which starts at $75. With
> Slicehost, it will be up to you to install and configure everything.
> Railsmachine VPSes come pre-configured with Ruby, Apache, MySQL, and
> many gems. They also have a gem you can use and be 100% up and running
> in 30 minutes or less.
>
> Let us know what you decide.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Robert Dempsey, Project Director

> Atlantic Dominion Solutions, LLChttp://www.techcfl.com

[Robby Russell]

On Feb 17, 2008, at 6:39 AM, Robert Dempsey wrote:

>
> Hey guys,
>
> We have had great luck with Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com/) for
> low-cost development servers. For production, we have many clients on
> Railsmachine (http://www.railsmachine.com), which starts at $75. With
> Slicehost, it will be up to you to install and configure everything.
> Railsmachine VPSes come pre-configured with Ruby, Apache, MySQL, and
> many gems. They also have a gem you can use and be 100% up and running
> in 30 minutes or less.
>

Another option would be our Rails Boxcar from my company, Planet
Argon. We launched it last year as an upgrade path for our shared
hosting customers. It's pre-configured with the Rails stack and our
Capistrano2 recipe is interactive so that you just have to cap
deploy:setup and answer a few multiple-choice questions and voila,
your app is deployed!

For more information: http://railsboxcar.com

Additionally, we consider Boxcar to be a co-managed solution. We have
over three years of experience developing and deploying Rails
applications and just a phone call away for live technical support. :-)

Good luck with your search!

Cheers,
Robby

--
Robby Russell
Founder and Executive Director

PLANET ARGON, LLC
Design, Development, and Hosting with Ruby on Rails

http://www.planetargon.com/
http://www.robbyonrails.com/
aim: planetargon

+1 503 445 2457
+1 877 55 ARGON [toll free]
+1 815 642 4068 [fax]

[johan pretorius]

I'm currently using a VPS at http://railsplayground.com, works quite
well. Their support has been great so far.

Slicehost.com was actually my preferred option, but they had
availability issues late in 2007.

--
rgrds,

Johan

[Justin Weiss]

I've been using Linode (http://www.linode.com/), and they've been
great and inexpensive (as long as you're comfortable installing
everything but ssh yourself). I looked into Slicehost, but they had a
waiting list the last time I checked.

--
Justin
http://blog.uberweiss.net

[Aaron Blohowiak]

I use rimuhosting. I really like their support's turnaround and their
prices. I have heard that Slicehost was not taking new customers
because they wanted to grow intelligently, which I really respect. One
of their features is self-service growth. That is, once you have an
account you point and click to upgrade your own set-up.. a reboot and
*poof* you're running with more power. They didnt want to way oversell
their capacity, so they managed how many people were signing up.

It is my understanding (would like some confirmation) that this is no
longer a problem.

My future projects will Likely run on ec2 for production.

-Aaron

[Philip Hallstrom]

> I use rimuhosting. I really like their support's turnaround and their
> prices. I have heard that Slicehost was not taking new customers
> because they wanted to grow intelligently, which I really respect. One
> of their features is self-service growth. That is, once you have an
> account you point and click to upgrade your own set-up.. a reboot and
> *poof* you're running with more power. They didnt want to way oversell
> their capacity, so they managed how many people were signing up.
>
> It is my understanding (would like some confirmation) that this is no
> longer a problem.

Slicehost is accepting new customers... I signed up about 4 weeks ago.
My understanding is it wasn't so much a growth issue as they don't
oversell and the lead time for new hardware was holding them back.

+1 Slicehost.

Took about 10 minutes to have a bare ubuntu install running. I went with
256mb. Later decided to go to 512. Took about 10 minutes to switch during
which time there was maybe 1 minute of downtime. If that.

-p

[Mike Pence]

+1 Slicehost. I live in my slice all day, every working day, using GNU
screen + VIM. Nothing but love.

[Alan Harper]

On 2/20/08, Mike Pence <mike....@gmail.com> wrote:

+1 Slicehost. I live in my slice all day, every working day, using GNU
screen + VIM. Nothing but love.

On Feb 19, 2008 2:49 PM, Philip Hallstrom <phi...@pjkh.com> wrote:
>
> > I use rimuhosting. I really like their support's turnaround and their
> > prices. I have heard that Slicehost was not taking new customers
> > because they wanted to grow intelligently, which I really respect. One
> > of their features is self-service growth. That is, once you have an
> > account you point and click to upgrade your own set-up.. a reboot and
> > *poof* you're running with more power. They didnt want to way oversell
> > their capacity, so they managed how many people were signing up.
> >
> > It is my understanding (would like some confirmation) that this is no
> > longer a problem.
>
> Slicehost is accepting new customers...  I signed up about 4 weeks ago.
> My understanding is it wasn't so much a growth issue as they don't
> oversell and the lead time for new hardware was holding them back.
>

I've hosted on slicehost and rimuhosting, I like both of them for support, but slicehost wins me on price and self service options

[larry...@gmail.com]

I've been using vpslink (http://www.vpslink.com) for 6 months or so
without issue. I moved from one of the Textdrive/Joyent shared hosting
accounts. I liked Joyent, but there was too big of a price gap between
the shared hosting and their Solaris Accelerators. I tried for a
Slicehost account, but the lead times were just too long. Vpslink has
been reliable, and a 256MB VPS is only $25.

[Anthony Eden]

Rimu hosting FTW! Their customer support rocks and they have been very
solid on the tech side.

-Anthony

[Pratik]

Not that I have any experience with RimuHosting myself, but just today
someone was complaining about RimuHosting in #rubyonrails irc channel.
According to him, they had some bad disk failure and RAID1 wasnt good
enough. And the restored data would be a week old copy. Additionally,
their servers was down for almost 10 hours today.

--
Cheers!
- Pratik
http://m.onkey.org

[Pratik]

I just checked RH's status page and they seem to be having a lot of
problems today. I totally understand such things happen once in a
while, but unless RH people refund every affected customer's current
month's fee, I'd never host with them in the future.

[Mike Mondragon]

I use Linode.com after Pratik made a vague recommendation for them
based on what I was looking for. I wanted a bare Linux installation
that I could configure on my own. I wanted Gentoo and they support
that. Their customer support responds in an hour or less and treats
you as their peer. I've upgraded my plan a number of times and all
that is required besides my money is a server reboot to access the
increased resources like memory, etc.

--
Mike Mondragon
Work> http://sas.quat.ch/
Blog> http://blog.mondragon.cc/

[Gammons]

This may be overkill, but give amazon EC2 a try. A small instance has
decent specs for the cost (roughly $75/month). It also still goes
down the virtual route. Provided you back up frequently, you can
mitigate any downtime/server issues by just firing up a new instance
and repointing the DNS.

-Grant

[Andre Lewis]

I put together a summary of some of the low-cost VPS options (linode,
slicehost, etc) here: http://earthcode.com/blog/2008/02/cheap_rails_vps_options.html

Since RAM is the #1 constraint you are likely to run up against (with
Rails you're more likely to be limited by memory then, say, disk space
or bandwidth), I organized it by cost for 256-1024MB configurations at
the various providers. Also included notes on backup policies and
whether or not they will provide a pre-fab Rails stack.

Hope this helps comparison shopping . . . any other low-cost options
that I've missed, let me know!

Andre

[Jose Hurtado]

Folks,

Has anybody tried MediaTemple.com, they offer full Rail Support and a grid-like environment, not a shared hosting account. Basic plan is too weak but with an extra $25 it gives you 512MB of dedicated RAM, 100 gigs of space and 1 TB of bandwidth.

http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/faq.htm#64

I also have friends with RimuHosting who are very enthusiastic about them, apparently they colocate with The Planet, so if the Planet fails they will too, otherwise good service.

Anybody can comment on MediaTemple?

Cheers,

Joseph Hurtado
Web Developer
Toronto, Canada

--
Take care,

Joseph Hurtado
Toronto, Canada

[horatio]

I had tried media temple about 8 mos. ago or so...hands down the worst
hosting experience I had ever had.
Their hosting process was notorious for 503 errors. At first I
thought it was me...but after some research...it turns out that was
the normal experience.
Aside from that, their support was extremely slow and less than
helpful. Needless to say, I pulled my account from their grid-o-
terror.
It did seem like a great concept...but just not all that effective.

[Jose Hurtado]

Horatio,

Wow, that is aweful, thanks for the input...

So Rimuhosting.com is back to the top of my list, followed closely by Slicehost.com.

Too bad there is not that much choice for Ruby on Rails hosting, but at least we know have some choice!! LOL

Joseph Hurtado

[Josh Susser]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned it yet, but heroku.com might be an interesting option. They provide dead-simple setup and hosting layered on Amazon's EC2, and a pretty slick in-browser code editing and dev environment for Rails. They are in public  beta right now.

By the way, if I were doing Rails training classes, I'd think strongly about using Heroku for my classes, to avoid spending an hour of the class waiting for students to set up a Rails stack on their laptops.

--josh

--

Josh Susser

http://blog.hasmanythrough.com

[Philip Hallstrom]

I've got some folks on MT. No rails yet. A couple of PHP sites. I don't
do much with them, but if I had to write a couple word summary I'd say
"sluggish". Things just don't seem quite as peppy as they should, but
then again I don't spend much time on shared hosting (even those this is a
grid server).

For instance their subversion access is really slow. The point of
annoying me.

As someone else said responses to tickets seem to be slow... they do get
answered though.

Anyone used asmallorange.com ? I looked at them for a friend awhile ago,
but ended up just putting them on my slicehost box since they get about 1
hit a week :)

-philip

[Mike McAulay]

I did PHP stuff on MediaTemple starting in early 07. I was planning
to do rails there too but wound up canceling before I got around to
it. As of spring of 07 there were still ongoing issues with their
grid technology resulting in severe slowdowns. These are amply
documented around the web, just google.

The other problem I had was that their tech support - while
responsive - seemed exclusively tuned to supporting non-technical
users. I put quite a bit of effort into crafting tickets that would
make it clear I was technically astute only to get responses roughly
on the level of 'have you tried turning the power on?' It became
clear to me after a while that I simply wasn't their target customer.

Things may have improved in the interim but based on my experience I
can't recommend MT at all. I use SliceHost now and I'm 100% happy
(low-traffic sites only so far).

Mike

[Lance Ivy]

I'll second the "sluggish" description for MediaTemple. Also, their grid is technically cool, but practically inconvenient. When something goes wrong, it's hard-to-impossible to determine exactly yourself and you end up relying a lot on the customer support (call, don't email) to figure out what.

Currently have domains on RimuHosting, and am quite happy there. I'd try SliceHost next.

--
rails blog: http://codelevy.com
co-founder: http://uservoice.com

[Anthony Eden]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Philip Hallstrom <phi...@pjkh.com> wrote:
>
> I've got some folks on MT. No rails yet. A couple of PHP sites. I don't
> do much with them, but if I had to write a couple word summary I'd say
> "sluggish". Things just don't seem quite as peppy as they should, but
> then again I don't spend much time on shared hosting (even those this is a
> grid server).
>
> For instance their subversion access is really slow. The point of
> annoying me.
>
> As someone else said responses to tickets seem to be slow... they do get
> answered though.
>
> Anyone used asmallorange.com ? I looked at them for a friend awhile ago,
> but ended up just putting them on my slicehost box since they get about 1
> hit a week :)

I used A Small Orange for a while, however since I was using shared
hosting and this was some time ago, there were serious stability and
performance issues. It is quite possible that they've resolved those
issues by now - I'm not sure.

V/r
Anthony

[Greg Pederson]

I have a mediatemple plan and am currently migrating my site to slicehost.  My reasons are 1) their servers are slow and 2) several times after 'maintenance' work my grid had been negatively affected.  Things like not being able to use my panel controls, not being able to svn update from my repository to even not being able to ssh into my account.  Opening a ticket does resolve the issue, but I've just decided I can't develop with this environment anymore.

Greg

--
Greg Pederson
Founder and Technical Director

Nsight Development, LLC.
www.NsightDevelopment.com

Gr...@NsightDevelopment.com
407-641-0327

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Greg.P...@gmail.com

[Joslyn Esser]

I'm also giving SliceHost my vote. It was a quick and painless process
to get up and running, and they seem to be not having availability
issues at the moment. I preferred this company due to the support and
library of technical articles to assist with all of the different
configurations we have come to enjoy in this profession :)

-Joslyn