I do JEE development for my day job, but lately have been doing a lot of Ruby on Rails development on the side for some financial websites I’ve been building. I’ve used PHP in the past for these, and see Rails as a better alternative.

One minor issue with Ruby on Rails is that it still isn’t to the point where hosting for it has been completely commoditized the way PHP hosting has. I’ve tried out 3 different Rails hosts and thought I’d share my experience here.

1. Go Daddy

I spent a weekend trying to get it to work, using a bunch of different tutorials. I never could get it to work. I’m not exactly a beginner when it comes to computers, so I figure if I can’t get it working in several hours, it is probably not worth the hassle. Can’t really recommend them.

2. Speedy Rails

I’ve been using these guys for a few months now, and am pretty happy. It is around $10/month (single mongrel instance), and they really make it easy to deploy rails apps. They offer a subversion repository that you check your project into and then click a button on a control panel to deploy the app using Capistrano. They seem very knowledgeable about Rails and are great to work with. The only downside is that you don’t have a lot of features typically found in other hosting plans like: shell access, ftp access, etc..

3. DreamHost

I’ve only been using DreamHost for a week or so, but so far it has been the best experience. If the service they provide remains reliable, they will be the best host I’ve used. Here are some of the features on their $9.95/month plan:

- 149 GB of storage
- 1.5 TB of transfer
- Unlimited domains/sub-domains
- Unlimited mysql databases
- Shell access
- Ruby on Rails support with lots of Gems installed
- Unlimited Subversion repositories
- One free domain name registration

The unlimited domains thing is great - I can host all my websites for under $10/month. Most of them are low-volume, so I don’t know how well it will work with a lot of traffic. But for just starting out or for smaller Rails sites, at least, it is an awesome deal. Getting a rails app working was slightly harder than on SpeedyRails, but much easier than on GoDaddy - it took me about an hour to get everything working properly.

If you decide to use DreamHost, use the promo code RAILSSTARTER to save $40.