tony spencer

For the Ruby on Rails apps we are currently building we definitely want to host on beefy dedicated servers but I’ve recently started rebuilding raleigh list in Rails and while this site does a decent amount of traffic it doesn’t justify the time and money to setup a dedicated box especially since 90% of the traffic will be on page-cached pages. So I started looking around for something like VPS Rails hosting and read Geoffrey’s excellent review of his real world experience with multiple different Rails hosting providers. You can tell this is the real deal, honest opinion as there isn’t one affiliate ID attached to any of the links to the host providers so Geoffrey isn’t trying to make a buck here. You’re on a roll Geoffrey! I’ve been loving the peepcode screencasts.

So I’ll save myself some headache and give RailsMachine a try. But it sounds like you can do ok with Dreamhost if you are trying to go on the cheap. I can throw in one additional experience here and say that the ultra cheap a small orange was not worth the money as fast-cgi on their shared hosting was painfully show for me. Perhaps their higher-tier services are better but I really like the sound of the railsmachine gem setting up the entire environment for me in under an hour.

Hosted Solutions is supposed to be the best facility in the Raleigh NC and Triangle metro area for dedicated hosting or colo according to everyone I’ve asked. I’ve been to the facility (when they were called Springboard Hosting) and indeed it looked quite nice. Well now that I’m really trying to get some cabinet space there I can’t get my foot in the door! I called once, left a message, no call back. Waited a week, submitted an email through their contact form. No response. Waited a month, called again, and left a message. Finally a salesman called me back and he sounded nice and even mentioned that he remembers my email (uhhhh, why didn’t you call me then) and tells me he would put together some packages and email them to me. That was two weeks ago.

If I have to chase down the sales team like this, whats it going to be like when I need customer support?

Still waiting for that price package Hosted Solutions…

Update:
Hosted Solutions has since been very generous with their time. The salesperson, head of sales, and even the CEO have been in touch with me and provided me with more than enough information. I was invited to the new north Raleigh facility and they gave me a tour along with some very flexible options for my hosting needs.

Thanks guys!