I recommend http://www.slicehost.com/ I was blown away by the simplicity and power of their service. All the benefits of your own box with far less hassle and only $20pm starting fee. Loads of really good documentation on getting a production RoR environment up and running too. They're probably the best bet for bootstrapers and students.

We use slicehost too for our web app. Even if most of their customers appear to use RoR, we didn't have any issue in setting up Apache and MySql and getting our Java/Tomcat/Struts/Hibernate web application up & running even on a VPS with 256MB of Ram.

Checked out the rest and Slicehost seems to appeal to me the most. I love their pricing plan! very simple and straight forward. Though how do they compare to RailsMachine etc. in terms of scaling Rails apps?

madmotive, could you drop me an email? I've got a question for you about this. My email address is on my user page. Thanks.

http://www.webair.com/ - I've got a few servers with them, great service and prices. I can get you custom prices that aren't listed on the site; for example I've got a quad xeon 3ghz with dual SCSI 120gb drives, 4gb ram and 10mbps unmetered for 249/month.

I'd definitely recommend http://rimuhosting.com

I know of at least 1 YComb startup that has used it in the past - and we're using it now. I've personally been hosting with them for 2 or 3 years now and it's hands down the best virtual hosting I've used (compared with 4 others I've tried).

Other friends are using Amazon EC2+S3 for scaling needs (on the fly load-balancing). Haven't used it myself, but I only hear great things.

I'd second that vote for Rimu. I used them when I started Furl and I continue to use them for my new projects. They are truly fantastic when it comes to support.

we use joyent.com - at least we try to... The portfolio is impressive, and we mainly chose them because they offer horizontally scalable rails solutions, something that many providers are still missing.

We requested the new server 2 weeks before. Still no server...

Do you know of alternatives we might be looking for?

Well, it turned out their mails got caught in the spam filter and we managed to overlook them :-( What a shame...

I like Linode: http://www.linode.com

They may be a little more expensive than other VPS hosts, but they make up for it with awesome, rapid service turnaround. I've been using them for three years, and I don't think I'd switch to anything except maybe EC2.

Geoff Brozny at http://www.glorb.com He is fantastic at customer support. Send him an email anytime and he will respond within an hour - usually, within a few minutes.

I'd recommend Railsmachine. I wrote a post about it here: http://blog.wakoopa.com/archives/how-we-got-hosted-the-rails-way

for projects written using Rails, i would suggest engine yard or railsmachine

Softlayer

As recommended by iJigg....Softlayer ... and they are just beautiful!!!

Dude these guys should gift me free servers. I've referred at least a dozen people to them since our launch. Until their great service continues I won't complain.

We're trying to decide whether or not to set up a box at our place for our initial launch or to use a remote host. Looking at softlayer prices, it looks like things can add up pretty quickly. What is your experience with the costs - does it make sense given the low expense of boxes and bandwidth? Do they have a good scaling up path?

We have two boxes with them. We've few ideas about scaling. I am personally of the view that when we have a scaling problem, we'll address it without worrying too much about it beforehand. It can easily bog down your startup in calculations that will likely mean very little when you do actually have a scaling problem. Having a rough idea in your mind is a good idea IMO.

I believe this is the advice that delicious founder gave too in his writeup.

I would recommend getting a machine and getting acquainted with the process of shell access (if you are not comfortable without a UI)...also u can do some real benchmarking as far as the hardware and bandwidth is concerned ... I pay $179 for a very basic server and it is a great experience! It works better for me because I cannot host at home as I need a larger pipe for demos!!

For simplicity and affordability, you can't go wrong with GoDaddy.

I've been on godaddy dedicated for over a year now, and there's been no problems at all.

Really?

http://nodaddy.com/

We're also on GoDaddy, and haven't had any problems so far (granted, we're pre-launch, so we haven't had a chance for any of the really taxing stuff to occur). We haven't ruled out switching services if there's a problem, but we might as well start simple.

You have to take into account company size when weighing complaints. The bigger hosting providers - GoDaddy and DreamHost - will necessarily have more negative opinions, simply because of sheer numbers. But there are many, many satisfied customers of them.

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