Over the last decade, Ruby on Rails has become an increasingly popular framework for web-based apps. At its beginnings, hosting Rails was a real challenge and required a fair amount of relevant know-how. Nowadays, there are dozens of hosting platforms that provide cheap and accessible services for building and deploying Rails apps.
In general, the choice of hosting should be based on your requirements and technical skills – some platforms are much more difficult to handle than others. Here's a selection of some of the most renowned Rails hosting platform s– read on to see how they differ from each other and which one might be suitable for your needs.
BlueHost (www.bluehost.com/)
Voted as Best Ruby on Rails Hosting for 2014 (http://hostingreview360.com/), BlueHost is a shared hosting platform geared towards personal needs and small businesses. Blue Host provides just one unlimited package – it's considered developer-friendly and supports the latest Linux-based technologies. Appreciated by both customers and open source communities, BlueHost is fast, rich-featured, scalable and reliable solution for all those who are looking for a stable hosting.
Heroku (https://www.heroku.com/)
This company is still a big fish in the Rails pond. Heroku is an extensible cloud platform that supports almost all major programming languages, including Rails. Even though its live tech support has been reported as sometimes lacking, the overall response of the Rails community is positive. It's a very flexible hosting offering countless add-ons and third-party service integrations. With Heroku, deploying and managing your app is intuitive and easy. Major problem? It's quite affordable at the beginning, but can get very expensive with the use of its add-ons.
Rails Machine (https://railsmachine.com/)
A great hosting created specifically for Rails, Rails Machine offers easy app management and scalability. It's a reliable place for hosting your Rails apps – it's very developer-friendly: it maintains daily and weekly backups, allows for application and system monitoring and offers s 24/7 tech support. Rails Machine has recently launched an open-source configuration management and deployment system called Moonshine. (https://railsmachine.com/projects/) Rails Machine is a classic hosting platform with a good reputation among the Ruby on Rails community.
Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/)
Rackspace is a global service, which offers a wide variety cloud packages to suit all possible needs. Rackspace requires its users to be more-tech savvy than Heroku, but for those less technically-inclined, it provides excellent assistance through a ticketing system or by phone – the word has it that Rackspace engineers are knowledgeable and easily solve all platform-related problems. The service itself is, however, quite expensive and it will probably work best for medium and large-sized companies.
DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com/)
DreamHost is a large hosting company that, among others, also supports Rails and offers various plans with some considerable discounts for yearly payments. The service is praised for its uptime and stability. They're also rumored to have a great tech support. All in all, DreamHost will work best for web devs who are not that advanced – the pros might find the control panel lacking.
Engine Yard (http://www.engineyard.com/)
Engine Yard is a platform praised for its efforts in optimizing the experience in their selected areas of focus. The platform offers a wealth of scalable infrastructure and a great customer service, but doesn't really provide anything new on the hosting scene. Some users complain that their app deployment can be sometimes a bit slow. Not for newbies – it's much more difficult to get the hang of it than of other similar hosting services.
About the author: Cindy Boesel works at BizStats.co.uk. She is interested in IT startups and the ways Mobile is changing business globally.
