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Ask HN: Looking for cheap Rails hosting

6 points by djmill ↗ HN
Hi all,

I'm looking to host a Rails app for 'cheap' -- less than $10/month.

The site is a fairly basic Rails app for hiking and camping -- create a Trip, fill in location, parking address, extra notes. Trips can have Photo Albums and Photo Albums can have Pictures. It's for me and my friends and whomever else wants to find new trails to hike/camp on -- similar to alltrails.com

Specifications: 1. Rails app saves images to /app/assets/images 2. I don't plan to scale horizontally because my user base will be very small. 3. Looking for as much disc space as possible.

Heroku seemed like a decent option (as I've used them for DEV apps before), but the disc space is ~1GB and the DB size is too small.

If anyone has any experience hosting a Rails app of a similar size, I'd love to hear who you're using to host on and how much per month it costs you.

Thanks!

11 comments

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t3h3lyk
You might want to checkout DigitalOcean for hosting your project. I host several projects on their $10/month servers and have had little issue. If you need more storage, you can always get a second server for hosting your assets.
djmill
Definitely going to check out DigitalOcean, Thanks!
michaelbuckbee
For that cost and specs your best bet is to get a VM at DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. Another option if you want to stay with Heroku would be to just use S3 for images. From your description you could then use the Heroku free tier and $10/mo would get you plenty of S3 space + traffic.
djmill
Nice, I've never heard of DigitalOcean, so I'll definitely look into them.

As for the S3 for image storing - that's definitely an option since the free tier of Heroku would be 'good enough'. Thanks!

matthewarkin
Why not use s3 with Heroku? You'll have to do this (or something similiar) anyways since Heroku will dump all your old data when you push a new commit.
djmill
Yep you're right, S3 with Heroku would definitely get the job done. I'm going to weigh my options since S3 will be slightly more dev work ahead, but this might be the best way to go. Thanks!
djmill
Quick glance at DigitalOcean looks AWESOME! Way better than the pricing estimations I was looking at for other hosts.

Thanks all for advising on DigitalOcean, I think I'll go with them :)

ariejan
It's really a question of how you value your own time.

If you want to get up and running fast, and keep it that way. Go for Heroku with S3. Enabling S3 file uploads is pretty straight with most rails plugins. Expect to spent money on everything: storage, dynos, database, mailing, S3, SSL, etc.

If you are on a tight budget, go with a VPS. But keep in mind that _you_ will need to setup the server, install ruby and a database server. Setup something like capistrano for deployments. Make backups. Secure your server. It's very time consuming.

So, as with everything, it's a trade-off.

mead5432
I really like A Small Orange. They have basic hosting for $35 a year that supports Rails. You don't get full control over your box (shutting it down, blowing it up and starting from scratch, blindly installing gems) but they have extremely responsive tech support. I have never had any problem with them installing a gem quickly and they are generally pretty helpful if you don't have much DevOps experience. It was a great place to start until I got more experience and felt more comfortable with administering my own instance on AWS.

Also, if you need to expand because your system is the new Instagram, they can support all the way up to managing your own instance.

jordsmi
Pretty much the same hosting you'd use for other types of apps. DigitalOcean, AWS, Linode, etc.
jpetersonmn
I'd also recommend digital ocean. I've been using several small $5 droplets for various things, including a couple of web servers and everything has been great so far. Also, as a rookie I really appreciate all the tutorials on setting things up over there.