My final web host?
As with most people who work in the web industry I have an itching sensation to build tons of web applications from the many good ideas I have. My programming weapons of choice, Ruby on Rails and Merb are both a nightmare to deploy. Books even had to be written. Many people will simply not touch the beautiful language of Ruby for this reason alone.
Jamis built Capistrano in promise of easier deployent. The scope of the project was huge and due to it’s complexity and it being open-source, it was very hard to get working. The idea was right and in all theory it should have worked fine. But many people had troubles in one way or another. I was one of those people.
Originally I had a nice Slicehost server but proving to learn how to properly and securely set up a server got the better of me and I decided that it was best to get more of a provided solution. Of course, I wanted to go with Engine Yard but starting at $250 was a bit rich for my blood and I wasn’t sure how worth it, it was.
Not only does Capistrano work out of the box on RailsMachine, but they also have provided a gem to configure the deploy.rb configuration file and for extra tasks. It is incredibly easy to set up an application, or to make changes to one with Capistrano and RailsMachine.
RailsMachine have shown to be amazing hosts. The server setup was a little bit late outside of the given 24 hour setup period. I sent in an email at 24 hours past and at 25 hours past my server was set up and I was billed. The support is efficient, speedy and polite. I have asked quite a bit outside the official scope of support and they helped me along the way.
The plans that they offer are more recommendations, due to the fact that you can customise them very specifically (with price add-ons for better hardware/features) and I have heard that upgrading hardware takes less than an hour. Because of this, if your app is choking but you know that it doesn’t need a huge hardware update; you can slightly modify your server(s) without having to pay an arm and a leg for a system that you obviously do not need.
It would be nice to see a web panel but they hint that one is in the works (on their blog), so I will be watching out for that.
