In case you’ve had your head in the sand the technology world is abuzz with hype about “the cloud”. Last week Rackspace had there own little cloud announcement and I was grimacing with the thought of yet another large host entering the fray. In case you don’t know I’m not a huge fan of “the cloud,” so I was imagining Rackspace might introduce yet another subpar on demand computing service. I couldn’t have been more wrong as it turns out. Rackspace wasn’t introducing a new unprove service, they were acquiring a proven leader already well respected in the industry, Slicehost.

Slicehost has been around for a few years now and has had such demand in the beginning I was on a waiting list. It was worth it because the service has been great. I’ve been hosting Snippy for a little while now on it and a few other things and I’m very happy. I’ve also had really great luck with Rackspace in the past so to hear that they were going to be adding their financial support and letting Slicehost run as a subsidiary is a awesome.

Slicehost will be able to keep it’s great level of support and is already lowering the pricing on some of their existing slices. Check them out if you’re looking for rails hosting, they’‘re well worth it.

Rails Hosting

I get a lot of questions about Rails hosting from this blog, so I’ll take a minute to post about some of my experiences.

Site5 Rails Hosting

If you’re looking for hosting for a small website like a typo or mephisto blog Site5 is a great hosting option. I’ve had great luck with them over the last few years. They have a Rails based control panel called backstage which is tied to a customized version of CPanel called SiteAdmin. The engineers at Site5 are Rails guys and they’re always doing some innovative stuff. They also have reseller plans if you need to manage client websites. This blog has been hosted there for a while now and because of that I highly recommend them for Shared Rails hosting.

Slicehost Rails Hosting

When you’re looking for a more dedicated hosting solution for Rails apps Slicehost is the place. You get a virtualized Xen host with the latest stable Ubuntu. They’re perfect for hosting Rails apps that need a little more juice than a shared hosting solution will give you. I’ve had great luck with them in terms of uptime and support. It’s one of those types of places that you just don’t have to worry about once you’ve got an app going. If you’re looking for an excellent Rails hosting environment, especially for development Slicehost is perfect.

Honorable Mentions

I’ve had luck with Rimuhostng in the past. They’re great operation and the support was always really good. They also have an out of the box easy Rails stack install script that makes running a current Rails environment simple.

Non-Starters

I haven’t had a Dreamhost account myself but I have managed an account for a client there and from what I saw the control panel felt hacked, the servers were overbooked and the support wasn’t good. That client switched from them after they wanted more money for a dedicated IP address and more money for support and more money for less value than what other had for the money. I’m sure everyone has heard of the fact that they charged their customers over $7 million after on of the programmers ran a billing script with a bug in it (yikes)!