I'm thinking about going with Ruby on Rails for an app I'm building and was wondering what people's experiences were as far as hosting. I don't have the money for dedicated servers so I'll be going with a shared plan.<p>Has anybody had any regrets after going this route?<p>I've read that Rails doesn't perform so well in these types of environments. Is it something to worry about when I'm still small or only if my app becomes very popular?<p>I saw HostingRails.com had a special offer for their Stacked plan. Has anybody used them and can provide feedback?
I'd go with Heroku to start. Its free to start, but does jump quickly to $36/month, and you can decide at that time where you want to take it - more Heroku, VPS, dedicated etc.<p>I haven't used Heroku, but then I haven't deployed a 'small' rails app since before Heroku started.<p>Edit: Also, make sure you're using Ruby 1.9.x - this alone will give you a bunch of extra performance to allow you to run more users on the same configuration at the low end
Find some place that offers Passenger Phusion. Makes hosting a breeze.<p>Also, if hosting/scaling becomes an issue, you might look at running your app under JRuby and hosting it using a Java app server. There's some overhead in learning about configuration, and such, but it can solve certain problems.<p>I've been using Railsplayground as a staging server, and while it works OK (though there's near zero load on it) I had stuff break because they decided to upgrade from Ruby 1.8.6 to 1.8.7. Plus, there's no `screen`, for example, which makes things a little harder than they need be.<p>Not being root means you have to live with other people's decisions.
dream host is good for about 10 visitors, after that you'll have to go to a VPS. I like rimuhosting- outstanding service for about $30/month. You get access to a virtual server, not a web interface, so you get a root account with a terminal.