Rails hosting review, 7 months later

March 2010 update:

Please understand that this post is very old and completely outdated. The Rails hosting spectrum has changed drastically over the past few years.

Read updated reviews here: The Best Ruby on Rails Hosting Services

Exactly 7 months ago, I wrote a very popular article about the various Rails hosting providers on a budget (shared hosting). That article is the most popular to date, and every month hundreds of people looking for Rails hosting advice arrive at my site. This is a short follow up.

Site 5

I’ve been using Site5 for a long time and I ‘m confident enough to suggest them to my fellow developers.
(Yes, if you get a plan from them through my links, you also support this site)

The current available plans are:

Plan Space Bandwidth Cost
Silver 10 GB 200 GB $6.97
Platinum 27 GB 750 GB $16.97

All these plans feature shell access, unlimited ftp/email accounts, and multi site capabilities (Gold and Platinum have a complete admin panel for up to 2 and 5 sites respectively).

These Ruby on Rails hosting plans include MySQL (of course), a series of Ruby gems (if you request it, they install more), SVN and Switchtower.

Customer service tends to be very fast and competent (above all Rails savvy), and they go the extra mile. I once asked them to install rmagick, gruff, feedtools, rubyzip, builder, ajax_scaffold_generator, pdf-writer, flickr and capistrano for me. On 4 different websites. I got a friendly answer in less than an hour. All done.

They are not perfect (no shared hosting service is) but they are good enough, and for the low monthly rate, they may be the best bang for your buck.

Conclusion

Give Site5 a try. In the worst case scenario, you can always fall back on their nice 60 day money back guarantee.

Update 08/31/2006: After careful consideration I’ve decided to remove my comments about Dreamhost. While what I said was entirely factual, and I don’t believe there is anything wrong with pointing out criticisms that are available on the net, what I had intended for my post to convey was that in my experience Site5 was a satisfactory service. I was not out to compare Site5 with numerous other hosters that I’d not yet tried myself.
I’d still advise any readers who are interested in cheap Rails web hosting to do their homeworks with Google before picking up one hoster or another.

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