I have a little toy in development, and I’m looking for a different hosting service, because my current lot don’t seem in the least inclined to support Ruby, let alone Rails. So can you recommend a great host? Here’s what I’m looking for:
- full support for Ruby and Rails
- install my own gems as required
- Perl
- CGI
- reasonable control over .htaccess files
- huge MySQL databases
- shell access
- ftp access
- domain hosting, preferably with control over DNS entries
- friendly, honest and transparent support
- business accounts permitted
- upto 1GB disk space
- crontabs
- must be secure, and have high availability
- preferably UK based
Oh, and it must be cheap! Thanks for any recommendations.
I’ve been using rimuhosting for two years now. Its a VPS solution so allows all the things you would want. They’ve got a great reputation and are very responsive. Basically run by a set of unix geeks. I’d say it is cheap for what you get, but I guess you can judge that.
http://www.rimuhosting.com
I’ve recently switched to DreamHost, they are supercheap for what you get (and that is a lot) and I love the down-to-earth attitude these guys have. Check out their blog at http://blog.dreamhost.com/
If you sign up be sure to Google for promotion codes, I got a 90$ discount on a bill of 190$, not bad!
I’ve been using the $30/month plan for a virtual machine at Linode, and I’ve been extremely happy (though the server has been a little loaded this morning).
They provide full root access on your choice of distro, and the plans start at $20/month. If that’s not a totally unreasonable budget for you, the freedom of root access can’t be beat.
All of my high-traffic applications use Rails caching, so I serve a lot of static pages directly though Apache. This lets me scale to moderately high traffic levels on a virtual server.
Honestly, I can’t image how programmers can be happy with just a user-level shell account. :-/