Cheap Rails VPS options
Feb 24 by
Andre
I did some research today on low-cost VPS setups for Rails deployments. My immediate need is to set up some staging environments, but I'm also interested in being able to quickly spawn new production-grade Rails environments as easily (and cheaply) as possible. Note: there's a good discussion on VPS's here in the Rails Business group.
Here are my findings so far:
| Who | 256mb | 512mb | 1GB | setup fee | Rails Stack? | Backups | Notes |
| RimuHosting | $30 | $40 | $85 | $10-$20 | Just ask for it -- Ruby1.8.6 Rails2 Apache2.2 mongrel mysql rmagick | "RimuHosting run backups of each VPS once a week. We try to keep 2 copies of the backup" Rimu also gives you 300MB of space on an ftp server -- I use this for rotating mysqldump backups | Rimu is the only one of these I've personally used. I have a dedicated box there and VPS's for clients |
| Linode | $19* | $29* | $60 | none | None | "Backups are your responsibility. You are protected against a hard drive failure on the host, as we utilize hardware RAID 1 mirroring across two drives. However, this is not a substitute for proper backups" | *Memory is in odd sizes -- $19 is for 360MB, $29 is for 540MB |
| SliceHost | $20 | $38 | $70 | none | They have good instructions for using deprec | Cost extra. "At any given time, you have access to 3 images of your system: a daily (less than 24 hours), a weekly (less than 7 days) and a snapshot (variable). Monthly pricing is $5/$10/$15/$30 for 256/512/1024/2048 slices. You can also create a new slice from the backup of another slice (cloning)" | *actually have availability right now (2/23/08) on all their slices. |
| SilverRack | $20 | $40 | $70 | none | "We have Centos and Debian VPS templates that come with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Apache 2.2, MySql 5, and ImageMagick installed and ready to go." | "We perform nightly backups of all of our customer's VPSs. We keep these backups for 2 days" | will give you $10/mo off if you're a member of a Ruby users group |
| VPSLink | $25 | $40 | $75 | none | "All of VPSLink's Ruby on Rails templates come with Ruby 1.8.6, Lighttpd, FastCGI, mySQL, and RubyGems 0.9.5 pre-installed" | FastCGI? WTF |
Rails stack setup / Application management
For the providers that don't have a Rails stack, there are some good options for setting up your own stack and/or deploying/managing your apps after you get your server running:
- RailsMachine gem -- Stack setup + App management
- RubyWorks -- Stack setup -- "RubyWorks implements a load-balanced cluster of Mongrel servers, which in most situations is the best way to deploy a Rails application today. It is packaged as a Yum repository (for RedHat/CentOS) or APT repository (for Debian/Ubuntu)" Works on a range of distros, including Centos 4,5. Uses HAProxy for balancing, doesn't include a web server.
- Deprec -- Stack setup + App management -- "Deprec is a collection of automated recipes, written in Ruby, for setting up production ready Ruby on Rails servers. This includes everything from creating admin accounts and setting up your ssh keys to compiling and installing the packages required to get a Rails application running on a freshly installed Ubuntu server." Works on Ubuntu 7.10
- Slingshot gem -- Stack setup + App management -- "a set of recipes, tasks, extensions and plugins that work with Capistrano to setup and configure a server for a Rails Application, quickly, and easily."
- FiveRun's production stack -- Stack setup -- "provides a fast, easy way to get everything you need to develop and deploy Ruby on Rails applications. RubyStack includes Ruby, Subversion, MySQL, SQLite, ImageMagick and several Ruby Gems, and will optionally install Apache 2.2 with rewrite and proxy support"
Additions / recommendations / corrections? Leave a comment.
Comments
jonnii on Feb 24
I have two sites hosted on one 512mb slice with slicehost. They have fantastic tutorials, great support and a good price.
+1
Eric Davis on Feb 24
I currently have a 512MB Slice and I love it. I used Linode's 360MB option for the Rails Rumble and it was so much slower than my Slicehost (256MB then).
I big factor is Linode only gives you one CPU for your VPS. On Slicehost I have 4 available (dual processor, dual core Opterons). In my application, I had a CPU bottleneck that would take forever on Linode. Once deployed to Slicehost, it ran good enough that I could take my time optimizing it.
Best bet would be to get one VPS at each one, try them out and keep the best one.
ro on Feb 24
I use quantact.com for more than a year... good prices too
Dave on Feb 24
Hi Andre -
Thanks for the post.
Dave
SilverRack
Darcy L on Feb 25
I'm on a 720mb Linode on the Xen version and so far the speeds excellent, There have been no real issues and what dealings I've had with support have been good.
David Reese on Feb 25
and um, joyent? i know you didn't claim completeness (you can't list everybody) but they're certainly something you should have looked into. lots of us love their accelerators.
JAlexoid on Feb 25
Try out Amazon EC2, there are even RoR prebuilt images.
Though the price for one month is comes to $79, but you pay per hour basis. And nothing beats the price of Amazon S3 :)
Nick on Feb 25
Been using vpslink for about 9 months now, their 2GB RAM account has given me a ton of headroom.
My advice to anyone starting out with a VPS is first to get rid of apache or lighty and install ngnix-- if you don't spring for the highest memory plan, this is a must. Also I would suggest using Thin instead of Mongrel, it has a smaller memory footprint, serves pages quicker, and can use unix sock files instead of ports...
Happy VPS'n!
Tom Asaro on Feb 25
Eric -
Sorry for your experience during the Rails Rumble, but I'd like to point out that the virtual servers issued to Rumble participants were UML based. We now have Xen Linodes, on hosts with dual processor, quad core Xeons.
Also, these hosts had 20-40 virtual servers on them with each team trying to deploy their instance at the same time. We think they performed pretty well under the circumstances, however we'd definitely do some things differently to optimize performance if we sponsor an event like this again.
Regards,
-Tom
Andre Lewis on Feb 25
@David Reese: Joyent is a more expensive, at 256MB=$45/mo 512MB=$75/mo 1GB=$125/mo (with $45/$75/$125 setup fees respectively) they are around 2X some of the lowest-cost providers. Since this list is "Cheap VPS's", I didn't include Joyent ... but I'd like to hear about your experience with them.
Obviously price isn't everything, and there are *lots* of qualitative (and quantitative) measures of how good a provider is. This list is simply a baseline comparison the low-cost end of the spectrum.
@JAlexoid: can you tell us a little about your experience on EC2? I've heard reports of instances simply going offline, and having to setup very frequent S3 backups to guard against this. Which sounded like a little more too much hassle. But again, I'd like to hear your experiences.
@Nick: great feedback! Any scripts or deprec-style gems you can recommend to quickly install a thin/nginx stack on a blank server?
James Young on Feb 25
+1 for Slicehost
vivab0rg on Feb 26
'Been using a 256Mb slice at SliceHost for the last 9 months, hosting a couple of Rails websites for some clients of mine. It's been great. Very good support and VPS performance. Love it everyday.
Fred on Apr 17
Take a look also at planetargon.com, they have some low cost plans suitable for staging and some more expensive plans for real production.
They support rails, mysql and postgresql as well as the usual. I was able to set up my own gems directory so the gems only change when I want them too. And I can add the gems I want.
Tech support is not, however, 24-7.
StoreCrowd on May 24
I'd like to give Linode the thumbs up, solid hosting & great uptime. We've not had any issues in over 4 months so far.
Once our app needs to scale with demand I'm looking forward to seeing how Linode handles the pressure but I'm sure they're more than capable :)