Hi Guys,

I would like to explain a few shortcomings of RoR before answering this:

1. Ruby and Rails both are extremely memory intensive

2. There are serious issues of scalability when it comes to high
traffic sites.

As Saifi pointed out, the hype is one of the big factors,due to which
there are two things: more requirement sysadmins with Expert RoR
knowhow and absolutely no availability of such people, so the ones who
are available ask for extremely high sums of money as monthly
compensation.

However, this alone cannot be the case.Rails Application run best in
the Mongrel.Hence you need a separate architechture for it
altogether.There are Gem packages required within the applications,
No one generally goes for shared hosting,for hosting their app, they
go for VPS or Slices or AWS, because only these allow the right kind
of hardware scaling(Multiple Mongels, and a load balancer like
nxginx),despite performing the normal scaling methods like Page
caching, fragment caching, memcached.

The real costly ones,the popular ones and the best performers are:

http://www.slicehost.com/

http://engineyard.com/

http://rimuhosting.com/

http://aws.amazon.com/

http://www.brightbox.co.uk/


Most of the big deployments like slideshare, twitter, scribd, Yellow
Pages run on AWS whereas 37signls apps like Basecamp run on Joyent

Hostgator,Bluehost are ridden with shoddy service and poor
performance.Site5 is the only good performer in Shared hosting sengment.



--- In witi@yahoogroups.com, Saifi Khan <saifi.khan@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Ror's:
>
> Recently there was discussion at the Saturday meet on Ruby on Rails
> hosting. So, i spent sometime trying to collate some data.
>
> Here is the tabulated information.
>
> (Assuming: a user is signing up for one year).
>
> HostGator $9.95/month
> Site5 $8.95/month + $49.95 (setup)
> Lunarpages $9.95/month + $2/month (shell access)
> Bluehost $9.95/month + $30 (setup)
> Dreamhost $9.95/month + $49.95 (setup)
> Joyent $45/month (starts at)
>
> When hardware costs have plummeted and hosting business is fairly
> commodotized, the average RoR plans seems to be $10/month.
> There is an additional setup fee in most cases !
>
> Is the customer paying dollars for
> mostly RoR hype + $1.0 (for hosting) + $1.0 (for manual setup
labour)
>
> What is the reason for this kind of pricing ?
>
> What is so different or unique about RoR hosting requirements ?
>
> What are the gaps or weaknesses in the current models ?
>
> Any insight related to cost model, infrastructure
> will be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> thanks
> Saifi.
>