Will Bridges

I've been thinking about my experience with hosting and I thought I would write about it. We just bought a dedicated server through hostingrails.com. What a beautiful experience it has been. They held my hand through everything and setup every peice of software I needed. Really, I only paid a $99 setup fee and $290 for the first month and I got a full server (specs here, but I got an additional gig of ram). It's an additional $40 a month for the extra gig of ram so that's why my price is $290 a month. Yes, it is a bit steep of a price given I could lease a server for cheaper but you really get what you pay for. They are specialists in Ruby on Rails and have spent way more time helping me get the server just the way I want it than the $99 setup fee I paid. All this and it's a month to month contract! This means I have no obligation to stay. It's been a while since I have been dealt with in such a fashion. I guess I should expect no less from now on.

Now, let's get to the reason I had to get a new dedicated server. I had a VPS (Virtual Private Server) through eapps.com. They are still running an old version of Apache which doesn't work will with Ruby on Rails and they are using FastCGI for rails sites. Ick. So, I decided, being a decent server admin, that I would install the proper version of Apache and all the things I needed to run Rails properly. Great, that worked okay for about 3 months. Then! All of a sudden my site and all my customer sites are down! Oh no! Come to find out, some of their automated tasks wiped my VPS clean off of their machine. They had no idea how to restore my custom config and they didn't tell me.  So, after a day passed and my customers were yelling at the top of their lungs I said "Okay, give me a new VPS and let me re-install everything". I was able to get a day old database backup from my VPS, which helped a lot. But it took me another day and a half to get the server back to where it was and all of my clients restored. The total cost was almost 5k between my customers loss of business and the time I had to spend restoring everything. Now, let me be clear, eapps is a great host if you are not doing anything Rails oriented. Their support is pretty good and you can reach them by phone most of the time with no wait and their prices are excellent. You can get a VPS for as low as $10 a month! Also, I had a chat with the president of eapps and he has told me about their plan to offer real rails support for hosting in the coming months. I told him the things he will need to do to get it right and offered to help them test anything they come up with. If they listen to my advice I think they will really be an awesome rails hosting company. But, as of now, do not use rails on eapps! Do not do any type of custom config if you are using eapps!