Looking for a simple rails hosting with a rails philosophy

Question

Hello.

I'm starting to develop applications using rails, I am designer turning developer.

I have not find yet a rails hosting easy to use.

I tried mediatemple and their RoR container, seems very easy in the control panel: just press a button and you have your application running. But they dont have sqlite3, changed to mySQL and I still cant make the site work.

Now I tried slicehost. Excelent chat support, but is not what I am looking for. I don´t want to configure everything manually in the command line from scratch.

I just don't want too many configuration options. I just want to run the applications I have created in my mac.

Simplicity. Isnt it what is rails about?

I will try now heroku, have you used it?

Thank you

Victor

Answer 1

I think Heroku is the simplest and fastest way to deploy a Rails application right now. You can use the free plan for testing purposes and proof of concept. Then, there are more plans of course for real world usage, but you can even start with the free plan and choose later if you are going to stick with them or go to a dedicated/VPS solution in the future.

With Heroku, you are maintaining your application in a Git repository. Deploying your latest changes is as easy as issuing a push command. For example:

git push heroku master

If everything is OK, you can then hit your application. For example if your application was called mysuperapp you could visit it following:

http://mysuperapp.heroku.com

There is an option of course to use a custom domain name if you want.

So far I am satisfied with Heroku, for what I use it for (testing, small apps for personal use). I haven't tried their paid plans yet though.