On Jul 29, 2007, at 6:29 PM, Warren Seen wrote:
> On 30/07/2007, at 7:46 AM, Mitch Pirtle wrote:
>> Going through the same experience here, but in a white-hot PHP world.
>> As such my answers are fairly PHP-centric, but with modification
>> might be of some reuse ;-)
> The only occasional hiccup we seem to run into is at completion, in
> relation to the client finding competent Rails hosting within their
> budget, there can be a little bit of "sticker shock" when you compare
> to PHP hosting, which has really become a commodity market. I imagine
> however this will resolve itself in time as more budget hosting
> options become available.
I really hope that budget hosting isn't going to become more and more
available. Why? Because it's very concerned that people will shell
out tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and develop their
business web site and then want to stick it on a $10/month hosting
plan to save money.
As someone who has been running a Rails hosting business for 2 1/2
years... I've seen this sort of thing happen more than I'd like to
admit. Even worse, I've had discussions with these people and have
long conversations explaining that it's not a "short-coming" of Rails
that they should pay at least 7x/month for reliable hosting compared
to PHP. I tend to try and explain that comparing PHP to hosting Ruby
is like apples and oranges. A much more accurate comparison is
hosting a Java/Tomcat app to Ruby/Rails or a .NET app.
In my opinion, budget hosting might work for the hobbyists, but
businesses that rely on their website should be discouraged from even
considering economy grade hosting, especially if the hosting company
"just added" Rails support on top of their existing economy PHP
hosting. If you guys are selling Rails to people, manage their
expectations on hosting costs early on. Otherwise people like me have
to explain it after they've gotten "sticker shock" and this isn't any
good for the reputation of Rails. It's often an easy enough to
discussion to explain, up front, "Rails will cost you a bit more to
host, but you'll save so much money in development and maintenance
costs." For many of us, I'd imagine a hour of our consulting/
development costs more than what a monthly expense would cost the
projects we work on.
Just my two cents on this topic... :-)
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/
+1 503 445 2457
+1 877 55 ARGON [toll free]
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