Ruby on Rails Website Hosting

Ruby on Rails (RoR) has now become the preferred Web application development framework for many developers. Whereas a few years ago it was hard to find a hosting service that provided support for Ruby on Rails projects. Things have changed over time, and you can now find several Ruby on Rails website hosting services. These hosting services provide a detailed outline about the installation and operation of RoR framework of your websites on their Linux servers. Let’s look at some popular RoR website hosting services.

AWS:
Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular Ruby on Rails Web hosting services. It is the most flexible cloud computing solution you can find for your RoR projects. AWS offers the industry’s best sample codes and libraries for RoR app development. The standalone libraries such as Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions, Simple Pay Donations, Simple Pay Standard, and Simple Pay Marketplace offer dynamic button generation, FPS APIs helpers, and IPN/Return URL validation that make a developer’s job easier. The Ruby Development Center at AWS offers several tools that are required to build secure reliable and scalable ruby applications. Some of the outstanding features offered by AWS include detailed Ruby documentation and ruby SDK. AWS only charges for the resources you use. There are no upfront costs and long-term contracts involved, and this makes it the most attractive hosting solution for Ruby on Rails projects.

Heroku:
Heroku is the second most popular Ruby on Rails Web hosting service. It offers several RoR friendly features such as a dedicated development center offering detailed documentation for Ruby on Rails developers. Heroku offers several add-ons to enhance functionality of your apps. At Heroku, you can find apps for database backups, monitoring and troubleshooting your apps. You can also find apps for caching that improve performance of your apps and communications and analytical tools. Heroku supports several open source backpacks specific to Ruby and Rails framework. These backpacks contain a collection of scripts that make compiling applications easier. The support for Git is built in Heroku Web hosting services. The apps can be deployed with just a single command. There is no doubt that Heroku offers the best Ruby on Rails tools to help RoR app deployment.

Engineyard: 
Engineyard is also a popular Ruby on Rails Web hosting. It presents an out of the box support to Ruby on Rails projects by offering a production-ready platform as a service solution to Ruby on Rails developers. There are no long-term contracts, and you get 500 computer hours free when you register for the free account with Engineyard Web hosting service. Besides providing Website hosting for RoR projects, Engineyard also offers you hundreds of useful add-ons to enhance the functionality and simplify architectural customizations of Web applications. Further Engineyard offers one of the best technical support for RoR projects deployment. Rails developers are bound to benefit from different resources and an engineering team with in-depth technical expertise in RoR app development.

Rackspace: 
Rackspace offers several good features for Ruby on Rails website developers. It presents Rackspace deployment services that automate deployment of RoR projects, which is faster than manual installation. With just a few clicks, you can select the platform, determine the size of your cloud application and your Web app gets deployed automatically.Developers only need to focus on app code as the caching, synchronizing and software requirements is taken care of by Rackspace. Developers opting for Rackspace also benefit from the Ruby on Rails tutorials and Rackspace Cloud API, which creates basic control panel needed for application development.

Site5:
Site5 is also one of the more popular Ruby on Rails website hosting service. It offers several RoR-friendly features such as support for latest Ruby on Rails 3 and a large number of pre-installed RubyGems. With tons of pre-installed RubyGems, developers have more freedom to modify and extend the functionality of RoR apps. This speeds up the development work and a website can be up and running within a short period. Site5 offers Phusion Manager, a multi language free Web app and server. The app server is fast and stable. It can be integrated directly into Apache. Site5 also offers good and powerful version control options through Git and SVN. Further Site5 supports FastCGI, which radically improves the performance of different Internet applications. It also enables developers overcome limitations of existing Web Server APIs.

Lunarpages: 
Lunarpages are a good choice to deploy your Ruby on Rails projects. It offers basic and business hosting plans for Ruby on Rails projects. It also allows shifting of the RoR project to Linux. Lunarpages offer extensive support for Ruby on Rails projects. It offers FastCGI on all servers supporting Ruby on Rails. It also offers a forum guide to help deployment of RoR application on Linux servers. Lunarforums.com is a separate forum dedicated to Ruby on Rails projects and helps developers with any RoR deployment issues.

Bluehost:
Bluehost is another good hosting service for Ruby on Rails projects. The hosting service offers fully-featured hosting plans at affordable prices. A few exciting features offered by it include higher number of installed gems for your Rails project, shell access, unlimited bandwidth, and disk space. Additionally, it also offers good server uptime to its consumers.

Hostgator: 
Hostgator offers good hosting plans for Ruby on Rails projects. It offers a free Ruby on Rails hosting for one month. Businesses can also have Ruby on Rails projects in their shared hosting accounts.The shell access option is available in all types of Ruby on Rails hosting plans. To use it, all you need to do is enable the shell access option through Plesk control panel. Hostgator is popular with Rails developers because it offers tons of preinstalled gems that make website development easy and fast. You can host unlimited Ruby on Rails projects through your Hostgator account. Hostgator has an excellent support forum and a dedicated 24×7 support for deploying Ruby on Rails projects, which can prove extremely beneficial to new Rails developers.