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I was wondering what people think is currently the best host for Ruby on Rails. I found some older posts on here on the subject but I wanted to know what the current agreement is. Shared hosting is ok for now but I would like an option from dedicated hosting later.

Thanks!

varatis
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Dan
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3 Answers3

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Even though some will complain, Heroku is still the best in my mind. Super easy to set up, super easy to scale. You can deploy to Heroku in all of 2 minutes. Best of all, it's free with basic usage.

Another thing I like about Heroku is that it has an unparalleled community using it, which means a lot of support on StackOverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/heroku).

If you need to know what ratio of web/worker dynos you'd need, look here: Heroku: web dyno vs. worker dyno? How many/what ratio do I need?

Although keep this in mind: it will be a while until you need to scale. As 37signals says, deal with scaling when you have that problem.

If you're looking for more flexibility, Amazon EC2 is always a good option. You pay only for what you use, which is always nice.

Linode is still decent, and fairly cheap too.

Community
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varatis
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  • I was thinking heroku. What is the best way to figure out exactly what I need resource wise when I setup hosting? – Dan Jul 11 '12 at 16:21
  • Cool thanks for the clear answer and that link was very helpfull. I think I'm gonna go the heroku route. – Dan Jul 11 '12 at 18:07
  • @Dan You'll thank yourself for doing Heroku later on when you deploy in about 15 minutes as opposed to a week of pain :) – varatis Jul 11 '12 at 18:17
  • A combination of any decent hosting company (like Digital Ocean, Linode or AWS) with Cloud 66 (http://www.cloud66.com) is a winner – Khash Jun 19 '13 at 10:12
  • @Khash Interesting! Never heard of it. Seems like it's similar to using a combo of Capistrano and New Relic. What's the advantage? – varatis Jun 19 '13 at 13:12
  • @varatis it brings all the tools and services you'd to provision, deploy and manage a RoR app under one roof. It's like running your own Heroku on your own servers without the need to manage an open source PaaS like CloudFoundry. – Khash Jun 19 '13 at 16:44
  • For anyone that thinks Heroku is a good option: it is if you want to get swindled. http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotated – Mohamad Apr 03 '14 at 21:09
  • @Mohamad "Swindled" is a bit harsh, even for what RapGenius is claiming. If you want to read the followups, you'll see that RapGenius is using an old Heroku stack (Bamboo as opposed to the newer Cedar stack) and Heroku seems to be working to resolve it (http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-money-trees-rap-genius-response-to-heroku-annotated). Heroku is far from perfect, but if you want to save the time and cost of hiring a DevOps engineer it's still a good beginner's solution. – varatis Apr 04 '14 at 15:22
  • @varatis if you read the entire correspondence you will realise that Heroku did not do anything about this problem at all. They told developers to "fix their stack." So they didn't solve anything. I think when you sell people something, at a significant cost, that is not what you claim it is, you are swindling them. I can't comment on Bamboo vs. Cedar. I'm not sure what difference that done. I wont know either since I invested some time in learning chef. Consequently I pay about 10% of what Heroku would charge me to host my stack. – Mohamad Apr 04 '14 at 18:31
  • My point was that Bamboo is a several year old stack, and you can switch over pretty easily. And that spending time on learning how to deploy is in a lot of cases more expensive than hiring Heroku. A lot of people prefer to pay a thousand a month to Heroku than paying a developer to work on this stuff, which in the case of small businesses would be a serious consideration. – varatis Apr 06 '14 at 20:16
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I think the best choice is AWS or Heroku

squiter
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It all depends on what you are building and how you are building it. If you app is pretty straight forward rails app and you are not doing anything special on the system level (lets say working with transcribing video in a way that heroku add-ons would support it) than heroku is probably one of the fastest way to get started an move along. If you are are building something on the system level where you app needs to have access to anything on the system you probably better off going with linode or AWS route, It also depends alot about the level of control/responsibility your are looking for.

THere is also survey being done right now about this very topic, they havent published the 2012 results but 2009 are available:

http://rails-hosting.com/Results/SurveySummary.html

Yuriy Goldshtrakh
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