I've used webfaction and slicehost quite a bit and have been very happy with them but wanted to check out a few others before I release my latest project.
Wondering who everyone else recommends or likes for their projects.
I use Amazon EC2 for several reasons. They basically boil down to having everything I want with little hassle.
- I can hold my own as far as basic sysadmin functions go, and I like having control over the entire software stack. A lot of Amazon EC2 machine images can be stripped bare to give me only what I need.
- I don't have a lot of money to blow on a dedicated machine each month, so it's nice to at least have a running environment even if it's virtualized (and therefore slower). At least I can know if my code works out in the wild.
- I pay only for what I use. There's also the option to leave it on and pay in advance (Reserved Instances). So whether my projects end up being just small diversions or whether they gain traction, there's a pricing plan I can go with. It was meant for companies to scale up and down, but I've actually found it useful for scaling my personal projects up and down.
- The management tools are pretty good. ElasticFox is clunky at times but it has everything I need without a whole lot of hassle.
- Elastic IPs. I can claim a static IP if I wish, or just choose not to use it.
Amazon has exposed a lot of stuff over their APIs, but don't be fooled into thinking that this means they added layers and layers of cruft akin to all the useless software that comes on new PCs. The APIs just work on a meta level -- useful if you want to package up machines and that kind of stuff -- but if all you need is a Linux box with good bandwidth for your personal projects, give Amazon a shot.
There's also the added bonus that they're, well, Amazon. And they're not going away anytime soon.
So you're hosted in Germany? Is your target audience in the US? Prices are great in Europe in general, but the latency between US West coast and Hertzner was too high for us. They also had network issues at some points with a lot of TCP retransmission, that did not help.
Good to know. The prices look pretty good as well.
I haven't used them but looks like I'm going to try. This part from their features list definitely helped:
Clone your Linode
Clone an entire configuration or just the images you select to another Linode. Combine with the IP failover feature and create your own high-availability cluster.
Both look like good sites. I've seen Linode before. Like I said webfaction is pretty good but I definitely get an unexplained slowing with my shared server sometimes and I'm not doing anything intensive. Just a simple web app like basecamp with a few beta testers.
We use Google App Engine because we lack serious sys-admin skills, and GAE abstracts all that away from us. Also, the datastore was much easier for us to understand and hack than relational databases.
For project hosting, we use hosted-projects.com because it gives us SVN+track+bugzilla and wires them together, and they have good tech support. I also like Beanstalk, but it doesn't come with a bug tracker.
Yeah! I too use a 128mb account with prgmr. Their support is good. They also hav an IRC channel #prgmr on freenode.
For testing and dev of a rails app, 128mb seems fine. Passenger+apache+mysql
I use account only for testing my rails app in a remote server. I tried running a personal blog on wordpress+apache along with the rails app. It got out of memory and I had to add a 512mb swap space to get it working fine(they've got instructions on their wiki). So if u are planning to get vps frm them just for testing out stuff, get 128mb or 256mb. That should save costs while you develop the app. Later on you can add resources. Just my 2 cents :)
Linode is fantastic. Their support and control panels are great. Anything not in their really cool guides, you can always jump into their IRC channel, which I've had really great results with.
I was remiss in not posting my experiences with Linode:
* I got an unintuitive error using the Control Panel to do a simple operation (resizing a disk) so I emailed support and got a quick response.
* Linode rolled out a security update for their control panel whereby one had to whitelist the IP's you could login from. This is a good thing except that I don't have a static IP at the best of times and when they rolled this out without notice I was cruising around the North Coast of NSW (Australia) with my sole connectivity being spotty GSM/3G.
* I emailed support to try and gain access to the Control Panel again. They said I could either call them as they needed to verify my identity or they could reset my account and email me new credentials. I did the later for above mentioned connectivity reasons. Apparently my response got lost in the support-rep's inbox (reps words, not mine) as it took a while to get a response. I can't remember how long but I think it was about 24 hours. I'd have been well frustrated if it was urgent.
* Guides/IRC are from my perspective not relevant to picking a host. What is, is the service itself — the VPS has been rock-solid and I like knowing that I can provision another VPS in ~15 minutes. I know prgmr can't do the later but hopefully they can do the former.
* Price is the real reason I'm going to move away from Linode (at least in the short term). I'm topping out with my Linode 360 at the moment. I'd like to move up to a 720 so I have some head-room. I'd also like to have a redundant setup in place when I start charging users. That's ~$860 a year with Linode versus (with 1024 mb instances) $384 with prgmr.
tl;dr: Linode are good but not exemplarily. You might be better off elsewhere depending on your needs.
For what it's worth I've never had any of the problems you've mentioned. Otherwise I wouldn't be posting such a glowing review. I think documentation + instant communication with the community is a strong point for any company as well, honestly.
But yes, as always, everyone has different needs and there is no one size fits all.
Understood, it's probably just the knowledge divide that makes certain things more valuable than others. I'm not a sysadmin, I know enough to get around and get things done and learn to do them properly, but the guides certainly help at times when I get stuck.
IRC I'm not really a regular on, but I've been on Linodes a few times and the people are extremely nice and helpful, I feel if someone can relate directly to my situation (same host, same features) it's a lot easier to solve certain issues.
You sound like you don't really have these needs for the most part, which probably makes the value of these services a lot less for you than for me. Although, this is the first time I've heard of prgrm(?), I'm going to need to look into it now, peaked my curiosity.
I've got a VPS with prgmr now and whilst it's too early in the piece for me to share any meaningful opinion, I will say that I think it's quite likely they represent genuine value for money. Feel free to email me (see profile) in a month or so if you'd like a more in depth review.
I use prgmr to host a bunch of stuff. My only complaint -- and this is definitely just me being stupid -- is that eventually I will have to upgrade the kernel and I don't know how to easily do that while making sure the necessary xen stuff is compiled in. Again, my fault, but be aware that prgmr really leaves you on your own.
Other than that, great service, no downtime that I know of in 7 months, and it works exactly as advertised. Plus it appears to give you about double the RAM as slicehost for the same price.
Scale as much as you need
Our unique multi-machine load balancing solution allows you to manage your account on multiple machines from our control panel. You can easily deploy your apps on multiple machines and our system will automatically provide load-balancing between these machines. Some customers have scaled up their sites to tens of machines for a fraction of the price of dedicated servers.
I think that's the reason I signed up.. That and the prices.. It's nice to know you can scale out your solution that way.. but anyway, I still want to have a plan B if it doesn't work out with them.
Also I'd like to see some more details about their "multi machine loadbalancing". The blurb that I found on their site was so devoid of facts that I'm tempted to believe this is just a red herring (hosted HTTP loadbalancer or such?).
I think their virtual servers are XEN based, having access to the actual console via ssh is nice if you like to do your own OS install on your slice. (They also have easier web interfaces for those users who don't want to do spend as much time sysadminning, but I have no experience with that).
http://www.gandi.net.
(it's a french company btw, so especially useful if you and your target audience is in europe :)
Wouldn't it just be worthwhile to get a VPS and setup what you need? You should be able to host multiple small sites on even a 256MB VPS. And of course you can just upgrade from there, if they grow too big.
I've had a VPS with tektonic.net for about three years. It's not oversold, I've never had unscheduled downtime. Scheduled downtime is very rare. Tech support answers their email.
Aside from that, it's a basic VPS running Debian. They're all pretty similar.
Same here... their support is awesome, and upgrades are easy. I would skip the 256 slice if you are doing anything but hosting simple static websites though...
I found that even a single Wordpress install was able to bring my 256 slice to it's knees each night when it was indexed by search engines (until I installed a bunch of caching plug-ins that is).
I was quite fearful of using Slicehost as I have practically no knowledge of system administration, but their support and tutorials made the whole process easy. I've done it a couple of times since and I'm getting faster each time!
You may want to setup a system just for cloning if you create a lot of slices for yourself or customers. You can then just restore it to a new slice, run updates, make firewall changes, etc, but at least you get some of the core work out of the way each time - and it's as easy as a few clicks.
A bit off topic, but in terms of source control and bug tracking, I use www.unfuddle.com which supports Subversion/Git, integrated bug tracking, simple, and has a free version
http://railsplayground.com specializes in RoR hosting - they offer both shared hosting, vps and dedicated servers. Extremely rapid and competent service.
I've used them for both my startup and some smaller personal projects over the last 10 months, very satisfied so far.
Depends on the project. If it's just for a simple content site, I'll use my hosting account through ASmallOrange. If I need Ruby/Python/more resources than a shared account I'll set the client up on GAE or Slicehost.
- I can hold my own as far as basic sysadmin functions go, and I like having control over the entire software stack. A lot of Amazon EC2 machine images can be stripped bare to give me only what I need.
- I don't have a lot of money to blow on a dedicated machine each month, so it's nice to at least have a running environment even if it's virtualized (and therefore slower). At least I can know if my code works out in the wild.
- I pay only for what I use. There's also the option to leave it on and pay in advance (Reserved Instances). So whether my projects end up being just small diversions or whether they gain traction, there's a pricing plan I can go with. It was meant for companies to scale up and down, but I've actually found it useful for scaling my personal projects up and down.
- The management tools are pretty good. ElasticFox is clunky at times but it has everything I need without a whole lot of hassle.
- Elastic IPs. I can claim a static IP if I wish, or just choose not to use it.
Amazon has exposed a lot of stuff over their APIs, but don't be fooled into thinking that this means they added layers and layers of cruft akin to all the useless software that comes on new PCs. The APIs just work on a meta level -- useful if you want to package up machines and that kind of stuff -- but if all you need is a Linux box with good bandwidth for your personal projects, give Amazon a shot.
There's also the added bonus that they're, well, Amazon. And they're not going away anytime soon.