I stumbled upon them last week after looking for an inexpensive dedicated server or VPS with root access. They offer slices of 4-processor RAID-1 Linux boxes (with your choice of distribution) for reasonable rates. You can add slices as you grow, up to the point of requiring a dedicated box. This is not a managed service--you have full control over your set up.
They are developer centric, appear to have a great community going and have received entirely favorable reviews online (at least as far as I could find). They are very Rails friendly (their interface is developed in Rails), but also support Python, Java, PHP, LISP, etc. With root access, you can install whatever development/server environment you desire.
I'm just getting set up, but so far, I have been very happy with their service.
Amazon (and others) will sell you time on a massive grid. Amazon's is called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and it seems like it might be a good alternative to a VPS -- the elasticity of each instance would be a boon to a quickly growing web service.
I am currently developing my startup's software on a dedicated server running FreeBSD, and I am paying some attention to making it so it will scale (probably in a load balanced cluster).
To this end, I have set up FreeBSD jails (low overhead chrooted full installs) so that I can test splitting up the application in various ways.
I would imagine that a transparent grid system would reduce the need to worry about scalability issues for many uses.
EC2 is intriguing; however. it is only available to a limited number of beta testers. The waiting list appears to be lengthy... I'm not counting on gaining access any time soon.
I'd strongly encourage people on this list (who I'm going to assume are technical) to get their own VPS, not a shared account somewhere.
I've been very happy with Future Hosting at http://www.futurehosting.biz/. I've got a VPS with Ubuntu on it and we completely control the box. We're paying $25/month for that server.
Why is that, exactly? Assuming configuring servers is not the core competency, what would be better about a VPS over a shared services?
What you trade off in control you make up for in free time. Granted, as you get larger and develop traffic, the trade off will need to be re-evaluated, but I don't see any major benefits at the beginning.
The earlier you set up your own servers and take care of them the better you'll be at it. If your seriously strapped for time maybe you can put it off, but it's a skill you want to have.
Shared services mean that mistakes made by any other client on that machine are very likely to damage you. Also, without root access, you are often stuck not being able to set a configuration well. For a hobby site, or a sandbox, shared hosts are fine and cheap. I would never deploy a real web application on one though. Many places will sell you a Xen VPS slice for $20-30/mo.
I have to say this matches my experience with any shared host for a serious web app. TextDrive is super helpful with customer service but not being able to get root on your server cuts off a lot of solutions.
So my advice to anyone hosting a Rails app or any other web app would be to go with a dedicated host (where you at least have a virtual server or something)
http://slicehost.com
I stumbled upon them last week after looking for an inexpensive dedicated server or VPS with root access. They offer slices of 4-processor RAID-1 Linux boxes (with your choice of distribution) for reasonable rates. You can add slices as you grow, up to the point of requiring a dedicated box. This is not a managed service--you have full control over your set up.
They are developer centric, appear to have a great community going and have received entirely favorable reviews online (at least as far as I could find). They are very Rails friendly (their interface is developed in Rails), but also support Python, Java, PHP, LISP, etc. With root access, you can install whatever development/server environment you desire.
I'm just getting set up, but so far, I have been very happy with their service.