Recently I started a quest for looking for some sort of a dedicated hosting or at least something I could rely on for Rails hosting. I was hosting my projects and sites on DreamHost, but got tired of the shared hosting and the minimal support from them so it was clearly time to start the search.

My initial search led me to this page on the RubyonRails web page. I thought about moving everything I host to one place, but from experience it’s not cost effective. So I’ve decided to keep my low traffic sites at DreamHost (as they work really well for my low traffic sites) and move my rails sites to something else. I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on a per month basis, so finding something on $20/month was what I needed to reach.

There were a few good places to look at, such as HostingRails, SilverRack, SpeedyRails, SliceHost and something even better, RailsMachine. After looking at these and had a few conversations with other developers, I decided that I wanted someone with Mongrel running instead of FastCGI.

I liked these options the best however HostingRails and SpeedyRails offers shared hosting; SilverRack offers VPS hosting. I looked at SpeedyRails because I’ve heard good things about them, but after looking at what they offer (they have dedicated, but no prices online)I decided it really wasn’t for me. Looking at SilverRack they had a good offering however I wanted at least 100GB of monthly bandwidth. That’s a big must for me! I then went to look at RailsMachine, however seeing that they were over my price range I decided against it.

I ended up going with SliceHost, as I wanted a challenge. First off, they offered a good price, $20/month for 10GB of storage, 100GB/month bandwidth, 256MB RAM. Where’s the challenge you might say? Well you have to setup the server yourself! I’ve played system administrator with Apple servers before without a problem, so I thought that it wouldn’t be much different with what they had to offer. It wasn’t hard getting things setup, took about 1-2 hours (I double-checked things) to get the server setup, but with guides like these, they weren’t hard to follow. I did need to get a few items with support, but they had several channels (Chat and IRC channel) to get support from and I haven’t had any troubles since. They do offer backups for an extra $5/month, which I’ve found that it’s worth it. I would highly recommend checking them out!