[Brug-talk] RoR hosting provider

[Peter De Berdt (10-forward)]

On 24 Oct 2007, at 13:55, Schoeters Simon wrote:

> I had a discussion last night concerning Belgian Ruby on Rails hosting
> solutions. Personnaly I host my RoR site outside of Belgium but  
> hosting
> abroad appears to be difficult for small companies (tax refunds seem
> difficult) so we were discussing the Belgian RoR hosting market and
> could only come up with openminds.

We host outside of Belgium (New Zealand provider Rimuhosting) and I  
really don't get what you're saying about tax refunds, there's simply  
no tax involved (unless you live in new zealand, in which case they  
will charge you taxes). Unless i'm missing something here.

> This is a huge difference with the PHP hosting providers in Belgium  
> for
> example. Are there any other RoR hosting providers with the same
> qualities as openminds? Same scalebility, service, pricing and  
> support?
> It seems that small webdesign companies don't have much choice (for  
> the
> reasons above) as to go for openminds.

As soon as you're able to run more than let's say 4-5 sites on a  
dedicated server, your cost per site can drop below a decent Rails  
shared hosting account. On top of that, you get full and unrestricted  
access to your server, can install whatever you want, don't have to  
mail for support and are less dependent of others when something goes  
wrong on your server. Rimuhosting for example offers me the  
possibility to press the power button of the US-based server from  
their control panel (not that I've ever needed to do so).

> Not that I have anything against openminds, I saw a few of them at
> BarCamp and they sure have potential (look at this mailinglist and you
> can tell they care about RoR) but I was just wondering...
>
> I'm not looking for a hosting provider but does anyone know any
> opeminds-like providers in Belgium? Any experiences? Are they ready to
> host critical enterprise RoR applications? OR is openminds today the
> defacto RoR hosting standard in Belgium?

 From what I've heard, they are the only ones who have the expertise  
to provide you with a great rails hosting service.

I don't know their pricing, but on our dedicated server the cost per  
application hosted is less than 15 euro/month and having worked with  
several shared hosting companies already that do rails hosting, I'd  
say the cost of post-setup support has dropped by 95%. All I'm saying  
is, I don't have to get up in the morning and be worried about  
getting phone calls about server downtime, forcing me to send an e- 
mail to the hosting company support, then hoping they will fix it  
within a decent timeframe. I'm living the happy hosting life now.

And above all, your customer will be all to happy to pay a little bit  
more for the hosting if it ensures a trouble-free uptime. Some were  
willing to shell out big cash for a skynet dedicated server (and  
their pricing is just mindblowing crazy) as long as their site didn't  
go down.

You do need get into linux via the command-line a bit, but  
rimuhosting's support will be of great help here (and great is a  
serious understatement). I have no affiliation whatsoever with them,  
but I've recommended their services to several people I know, ranging  
from Java to PHP to Python to Rails hosting and they still thank me  
every now and then for my recommendation.


Best regards.


Peter De Berdt
Research & Development
Software Expert

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