YARHT (Yet Another Rails Hosting Thread)

[Shalev NessAiver]

I have seen many different people asking for free Rails hosting. As I
understand it, these people are looking for
a free/very cheap host to display their Rails apps on the public.
If/when those apps gain a large following, I am sure
that the developer of the app would migrate it to a higher-end, paid
server. Until that point, however, their seems to be
a fair amount of people who could use some cheap/free Rails hosting.
So... I pose the question:

Would you utilize a service that offered Rails hosting for a fee
averaging around $1 a month? This would be a fairly
fast machine running lighthttpd + FastCGI. Bandwidth would not be very
large, but it should be enough to support
a small group based around that app. This would serve as sort of
intermediate, testing stage for your new soon-to-be-a-hit
Rails app.

What do people think about this?


-Shalev

 

[Sascha Ebach]

I have seen many different people asking for free Rails hosting. As I
understand it, these people are looking for
a free/very cheap host to display their Rails apps on the public.
If/when those apps gain a large following, I am sure
that the developer of the app would migrate it to a higher-end, paid
server. Until that point, however, their seems to be
a fair amount of people who could use some cheap/free Rails hosting.
So... I pose the question:

Would you utilize a service that offered Rails hosting for a fee
averaging around $1 a month? This would be a fairly
fast machine running lighthttpd + FastCGI. Bandwidth would not be very
large, but it should be enough to support
a small group based around that app. This would serve as sort of
intermediate, testing stage for your new soon-to-be-a-hit
Rails app.

What do people think about this?

Please excuse if the following sounds a little ranty but I think your
expectations are sompletely unrealistic. That is if you talk about
"commercial" hosting.

I don't think this idea is at all "commercially" possible. At least not
in the western hemisphere. The problem is not the hosting itself, but
the service hours that come with it. Setting up a completely automated
way of mass hosting Rails apps requires some planning and programming
upfront. So there is probably some weeks investment in making this work.
(Just ask the ppl at Textdrive, they can probably tell you). For 1 buck
per month I would be willing to do it in case you were willing to pay 10
bucks for every service inquiry you make per email and a dollar for
every minute on the phone

See, even if you just rent a virtual root account on a big machine (like
4 CPUs, 4 GB Ram, 6 SCSCI RAID drives) like we do for our customers it
costs you like 60-70 Euros + Backups and what not. At our hosting
company you get a guarantee for 100 running processes. Now you can do
the math. Even if all 100 processes were available (which they wouldn't
be if you account for db servers, email servers and what not) you would
need 50 Rails customers allowing each customer a Rails app with 2
processes. You earn 50$ from your customers and have to pay like 100$ to
your host. That doesn't sound quite right to me.

Now imagine having 50 customers who rely on you and something doesn't
work out and the they actually call ...

It is my opinion that Textdrive already does what you want for 12$ a
month. 12$ a month for this kind of hosting sounds to me like pro bono
project already. I don't believe they can be profitable with that. To
earn money with that kind of fee structure you would need thousands of
customers and hope they don't call too often.

You can read about the problems that occur if you read in between the
lines on David's blog

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/03/31/reasonable-expectations-on-a-12-plan/

I think what you are looking for is a community project with fundings
from a bigger investor / hoster. Even than it would be very difficult.
And if it were funded you shouldn't need to pay even 1$

1$ per Rails app per month, I think this is not even financialy viable
in India or China.

If you ask me I would not do it under 40-50$ per month per account.
Otherwise I wouldn't know how to turn a enough profit to pay everyone
involved. Everything else would be a donation based community project
which is not to be confused with "hosting".

The alternative would be to simply self host the applications and use a
dynamic dns provider like dyndns.org for your hostname. This doesn't
even cost you a single extra buck a month and you can experiment all you
want on your server. Since you don't have high bandwidth requirements
this should be the ideal solution.

Sascha

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello Sascha,


SE> It is my opinion that Textdrive already does what you want for 12$ a
SE> month. 12$ a month for this kind of hosting sounds to me like pro bono
SE> project already. I don't believe they can be profitable with that. To
SE> earn money with that kind of fee structure you would need thousands of
SE> customers and hope they don't call too often.

With a complex and still immature infrastructure like rails this will
happen. Be sure about it.

SE> I think what you are looking for is a community project with fundings
SE> from a bigger investor / hoster. Even than it would be very difficult.
SE> And if it were funded you shouldn't need to pay even 1$

The question is why should they give fundings ?

What is the benefit for a company or NGO ? You can maybe get some
goverment sponsoring for putting people online but surely not for
technical geeks - even i would complain about this tax payers waste of
money.

SE> 1$ per Rails app per month, I think this is not even financialy viable
SE> in India or China.


Ever tried internet hosting or access in this countries ?

<language-alert> It's so fucking expensive. </language-alert>

Around 1000 US$ for a 10MBit line per monthThis countries only have a
price advantage for simple uneducated work. I tried to setup an IT
company in Thailand once and quickly gave up.

SE> If you ask me I would not do it under 40-50$ per month per account.
SE> Otherwise I wouldn't know how to turn a enough profit to pay everyone
SE> involved. Everything else would be a donation based community project
SE> which is not to be confused with "hosting".

Yes 100% Ack. I posted this before and i repeat myself here:

Ruby and Rails cost money. They are not a mass product and so ther
will be never be free hosting (acceptable quality). It's the same as
with java in the past. Maybe in 10 years with Rite3000
(Ruby 3.0) the interpreter is optimized enough to do this but not now.

 

[Matt Lawrence]

See, even if you just rent a virtual root account on a big machine (like 4
CPUs, 4 GB Ram, 6 SCSCI RAID drives) like we do for our customers it costs
you like 60-70 Euros + Backups and what not. At our hosting company you get a
guarantee for 100 running processes. Now you can do the math. Even if all 100
processes were available (which they wouldn't be if you account for db
servers, email servers and what not) you would need 50 Rails customers
allowing each customer a Rails app with 2 processes. You earn 50$ from your
customers and have to pay like 100$ to your host. That doesn't sound quite
right to me.

I will point out that jvds.net User Mode Linux virtual hosts are more like
$20/month. Not a particular deal breaker in my book, I pay a few times
that for my DSL connection at home, which gives me a /26 subnet. Over the
past several years, I've hosted systems for some of my friends and I plan
on hosting some user mode linux virtual systems for some other friends.
And, no, most of y'all aren't that close friends.

-- Matt
Nothing great was ever accomplished without _passion_

 

[Aquila]

Would you utilize a service that offered Rails hosting for a fee
averaging around $1 a month? This would be a fairly
fast machine running lighthttpd + FastCGI. Bandwidth would not be very
large, but it should be enough to support
a small group based around that app. This would serve as sort of
intermediate, testing stage for your new soon-to-be-a-hit
Rails app.

I'll answer too because I started one of those RHTs (Rails Hosting Threads).
From my point of view $1 seems very nice but also too little. It's too good
to be true, I can't believe you'd offer something good for that price. If
I'd see such advertisements I would think their scams.
From what I experienced I think that it's more important to get some large
free hosting service to support Rails than to start smaller startups based
on very low prices.

Just my 2 ? cents of course!

 

[Lasse Koskela]

If you ask me I would not do it under 40-50$ per month per account.
Otherwise I wouldn't know how to turn a enough profit to pay everyone
involved. Everything else would be a donation based community project
which is not to be confused with "hosting".

I'd like to note that while I a $50/month hosting fee is quite
affordable for a business, it's far too much for an individual in many
countries to shell out for non-commercial purposes like running the
blog you've just created as your first foray into Rails.

Sure, that $50 is just as easily spent in a bar on a friday night or
on a single computer book, but that doesn't mean that an extra fifty
magically appears into your wallet after you spend one. At least
Amazon.com hasn't sent me a single note back after ordering from them


I myself live in Finland and the cost of living is more or less equal
to other western european/scandinavian countries. I'm currently paying
something around $15 for hosting at pchighway.com (which has Ruby but
not Rails and no FastCGI, I think) and that's more or less exactly
what I'm willing to pay for such a service. It doesn't really matter
what you're offering on top of that $15.

The $12 hosting plans for Rails is something I've thought about
(http://radio.javaranch.com/lasse/2005/03/30/1112214779551.html).
Still, paying TextDrive $12 for 300 megs of disk and 3 gigs of
bandwidth is still pretty far from what you get from "regular" hosting
companies running PHP/Java. If Rails is too heavy on the machines to
achieve the same number of users per box, there's a performance issue
to tackle and higher pricing is not a long-term solution.


-Lasse-

 

[Shalev NessAiver]

Ok. I'm just going to answer everything at once.

I probably didn't describe this perfectly, but I was referring to a
service that would NOT try to make a profit.
I was actually considering the lowest possible amount required for
something like this. I will now modify this
proposal to expand it to the general community (as I was actually
intending ):

Is their enough people in the RoR community who would like such a
service that they all wouldn't mind getting
together and renting space on some larger server?


I'm guessing probably not, but it never hurts to ask.

-Shalev