Rails Hosting
If you have been jumping from provider to provider trying to find a really good rails hosting service, then you start to wonder why finding a high quality rails host seems so difficult.
The short answer is a very simple one.
Rails are expensive for hosting providers, and can be a giant pain to deal with.
Large hosting companies tend to have problems staying up to date on the latest ruby and rails software and getting it installed in a timely manner.
It also means that they need to have a support team that actually understands ruby and rails and can answer your questions intelligently.
It also means that they need to continually create and update help documents as well as continue to provide reliable uptime for all computers.
In fact, many hosting companies have only added the option to use ruby and rails because so many people were trying to custom install it for themselves and would end up crashing the server.
Rails is really made to be used only on a dedicated server. This allows the server to spit out data whenever it is needed.
Rails sucks up a large amount of RAM in order to keep speeds up, but that is incredibly difficult to do in a shared hosting environment.
Shared hosting companies will normally do an Apache/FastCGI stack by dumping the dispactch.fcgi processes every 60 seconds and hoping that no one really needs the bandwidth that they sign up for. The only way to cram hundreds of sites into a shared hosting environment is to use PHP.
With all this in mind, there are a few indicators that you can keep an eye out for, which will let you know that you have found a solid rails hosting provider.
1. Shell Access
Shell/SSH access is 100% critical. If you cannot get to the actual command line, then why waste your time.
2. Updated Speed
To be a good rails hosting provider, they must have both speed and updates. If they do not update their servers quickly, they will be left open to unnecessary security threats.
Additionally, if the sever is on CGI alone, it will be painfully slow. Make sure that the host has FastCGI or SCGI, and if you are really lucky – Mongrel.
