Rails By the Slice

There’s a new (?) hosting service around that focuses on Rails hosting and does it by the slice. Rails Engine starts at about $300 USD for a slice of a Virtual Private Server. Kinda steep, but not too bad. Considering how much setup they do for you, that’s nothing to complain about. There is Slice Host for a lot less money, but with you doing ALL of the configuration too. There’s also Hosting Rails which has a lot of cheaper but viable options available.

It’s starting to be common knowledge that VPS hosting is the best way to go for Ruby on Rails sites as well as Python based TurboGears and Django. These types of frameworks tend to have a persistent process (or a few of them) that live in server memory. Traditional shared hosting doesn’t jive well with this. VPS is like protected memory, but your whole site is almost on it’s own server. A bit like the time-share computing of the 70’s! Anyway, if you’re using one of these frameworks, do yourself a favor and get VPS hosting.

If you want to learn a lot or just do things the hard way, you could go cheap and try this stuff on DreamHost, but your mileage will not be great.