After a bad experience trying to get even the simplest Rails application running at Lunarpages, I'm moving to Slicehost. Does anyone have an opinion as to which of their Linux distros to use for a fairly high-traffic Rails site? They offer CentOS, Debian 5, Fedora (10 to 12), Gentoo, Red Hat EL 5, and Ubuntu (8 and 9).
While we're on the subject, does anyone have any opinions as to the relative merits of Slicehost versus Amazon WS?
Thanks!
I've always been a fan of Ubuntu, it's easy to use and lots of other people are using it so there is a lot of information if you run into trouble.
I've never used Slicehost but AWS is pretty great if you're going to be bringing instances up and down often (since you only pay for what is running). If you just have one server that will be running continuously then AWS might end up costing more without giving you much benefit. It all depends on how you use it though and if the flexibility of AWS is worth the (potential) added cost in your situation.
I've run RoR on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on Amazon (Approx 3-4 years worth of uptime across a few servers for a couple of sites) and Slicehost (Approx 8 months). I've had zero complaints/niggles/problems with the linux distro or the hosts themselves. I'd just grab whatever linux distro you're most comfortable with, I build pretty much everything from source for RoR in production anyway:
etc. etc.
As to the merits of your two options, I've always used Amazon for work/business and slicehost for smaller stuff. This is pretty subjective and I really can't fault either, but for work/important stuff I'd still lean towards Amazon. It's not a strong leaning, but the flexibility of turning on/off instances at will, plus S3 would have me go that way again.
I'm using slicehost and running Ubuntu intrepid with passenger/rails.
My choice was mostly based on there being a lot of rails related documentation for that distro. Which has definitely made it easier.
In terms of dedicated rails hosts, don't forget to check out heroku. They use a completely git-based system to deploy your app (which can be written against any of the major Ruby frameworks), and you only get charged for the database and CPU-hours that you actually use.
I also have heard good things about EngineYard.
If you are interested in systems administration. I would go with Slicehost, Linode or AWS ec2, Linode has been shown to be more performant (link) than both Slicehost and AWS.
With that said, if you aren't interested in systems administration I would go with Heroku. It is the easiest way to deploy and management is minimal. You do have to be aware that Heroku is limited on some 3rd party services you would install on your own, but but they do have some packages included that you can enable for sending email etc. You are also limited on file size and they recommend you store your assets on AWS s3.
In terms of overhead Linode is less than AWS ec2, because AWS ec2 is really for high availability, Heroku is the least as mentioned above. AWS will cost you more than Slicehost or Linode and I think if your site is small more than Heroku too.
You will need decent Linux chops to get going on AWS, Slicehost, and Linode. Heroku will keep you away from most of this but also limit you if you need something really custom. For distro choice I would say Ubuntu hands down if you are new.
Ubuntu is likely the most popular OS for Rails, probably because of Ubuntu being a very popular Linux distro. It's a great OS that will do anything and everything you need it to.
Having said that, it's not necessarily the only distro that works well with Rails. CentOS, for instance, is an excellent choice as well.
I would also second other people's recommendations of Heroku, and EngineYard as well. For VPS, I would probably rather pick Linode over Slicehost.
I'm partial to Ubuntu, as once you get your apt-get all updated and squared away, installation is quite quick and painless. Though, I'm sure this is said for any distro that makes good use of apt-get.
I second (or whatever sequence this shows up as) the calls for Heroku and Linode.
As for Amazon, I use the S3, and RDS if I can. The RDS not as much, but I'm moving some stuff there. But paperclip with the S3 is pretty great.