Working With Rails

For something this small, SliceHost is really quite good and extremely cheap. You get a simulated dedicated machine running on a big VMWare box.

I’ve only tried 2 things:

Bluehost – absolutely sucked

Heroku – if you’re using git for source control, Heroku is the most amazing thing. It really is as simple as their main page says. For your small app you can push it up in around ten minutes for free to try it out. If it’s not fast enough for your needs then you can pay for more power.

Bryan thanks for the tip, I got it up and running in 15 minutes. It was great experience, those guys did hell of a job with heroku.

I’ll second Slicehost here. The smallest slice (256MB) is more than enough for most small apps and the experience you gain from setting up your own server and knowing the deployment process is invaluable when you need to expand or troubleshoot issues.

Heroku definately looks interesting and I had a play with the system when it first came out but I wouldn’t say that their free option would scale that well, especially if you have times of high peak usage. Once you move onto their pay-for options there are cheaper alternatives available.

How have you found the Heroku experience since your initial setup?

Deployment is a dream : git push heroku. On the down side, I’ve lost quite a bit of time to get calendardateselect control to work correctly with european date time format. It’s because I didn’t find a way to change Rails ENV variables. So I think virtual machine with full control + capistrano or something similar is a better choice. Still heroku is usefull for demos and stuff.

For environment variables, Heroku gives you config vars

My first Rails application is being served on Heroku. I’m using Authlogic and FasterCSV gems by just putting their names in a file called .gems, next time I “git push heroku” it installs the gems before restarting the application.

I take a copy of the production database with “heroku db:pull” ... even when my local database was SQLite3 this worked like a champ.

I’m a little disappointed with their customer interaction; when they had a git server issue that took down all their served applications they didn’t have too much to say about it. I’d love to see this work out for them because for me it’s about as simple as I can imagine.

Hi Bryan
I have been using herokugarden with my small app for a while now but I am trying to switch to heroku for the past few days but I cant seem to get authlogic to work on heroku. Did you have any problems with authlogic, any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

YKK,

what’s the problem with Authlogic? Can you share some details?

Bryan

Check out ocs solutions (http://www.ocssolutions.com/). I have nothing but good things to say about them. Cheap, good service, good speed.

I use them to host my site (www.babyphonedirectory.com).

Check http://webbynode.com/

If you plan on not having more than 10 – 15 users go with Heroku