We used to use Slicehost. We had over 20 slices of varying sizes. We found that with such cloud setups the shared I/O was not working for us. Our application is heavy I/O app and and with most cloud setups you tend to share I/O with others on the machines, so you will see inconstancies. So depending on your app you may want to consider if I/O is important to you. Also our app is pretty memory intensive so again cloud started to make less sense for us when we could get dedicated machines with 48GB or Ram for a fraction of the cost of a cloud server.
We ultimately opted for a Hybrid Architecture setup with redundant and beefy bare-metal servers hosted at Rackspace with a dedicated connection to their Cloud servers. This gives us the best of both worlds with dedicated hardware and the elasticity of the cloud. The guys at Urban Airship did something similar using AWS. I believe Amazon is working on a product offering based off of the Urban Airship setup. Not sure if it is out yet, but check out their blog (http://urbanairship.com/blog/) they might have talked about it. We run most critical items off of the dedicated machines but if we need to scale up we can spin up cloud servers and deploy quickly as needed until we have time to get additional hardware. Cloud is also good for our less critical tasks and when we want to test things out. Anchor Systems does all our server management and builds using Pupet and we deploy with Capistrano. New Relic is a great tool for monitoring app and basic server level analytics. We are very happy with our choice of Rackspace. Hope this helps. On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:44 PM, Adam Grant <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Kevin, > > My friend uses Rails Machine for his hosting. He pays around $500/month > for their VPS servers and support, and they help with deploying your Rails > site using Moonshine (Capistrano + Puppet). They heavily utilize Github, > and will fork your project, setup all the Moonshine configs, and do a pull > request back to your repo. They also update the puppet manifests when new > updates come out that they push to all their clients using the pull > requests. > > They also setup a parallel staging environment to provide you with the > proper workflow for pushing out new changes. > > With Rails Machine hosting, you have the option for integrating > performance apps into your hosts, like Chartbeat and NewRelic. > > They also are first line support when issues crop up, but will escalate if > it's something they can't deal with. > > He's been happy with them. It seems to be pretty sweet. > > Regards, > - Adam > > > On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Kevin Ball <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hey SDRuby, >> >> After experiencing too much instability that we could do nothing about, >> we've decided to move off of Heroku, and are currently evaluating our >> options. I want to throw out the question to the community: What hosting >> providers do you use for Rails applications? What have been the ups and >> downs of those providers? Do you have strong recommendations of providers >> to use or avoid? Thanks much, >> >> -Kevin >> >> -- >> SD Ruby mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > > > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > -- StockTwits.com Real-time Investment Ideas. We're hiring! http://stocktwits.com/jobs -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
