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http://engineyard.com/hosting http://engineyard.com/hosting Monthly cost per slice $399.00 Setup cost per slice $299.00 Prices are for a single applicat

http://engineyard.com/hosting http://engineyard.com/hosting Monthly cost per slice $399.00 Setup cost per slice $299.00 Prices are for a single application deployed on a slice. Each additional application installed on your slice is an additional $50 per month per slice with a $100 setup fee Pricey. Is it that hard to administer RoR apps?

jharrison 18y ago
What EY does can't compare to your average VPS hosting and is absolutely not even close to shared hosting. If you poke around their site (looking at more than the price), you'll find a lot of information about the depth of their offering. They have a couple great graphics that really fill in some of the blanks. But, more than all of the great tech, you have a team of people that are passionate about what they do, which is to keep your app up and running while you're on the beach. Alright so maybe you're not on the beach but the point is that if you have a complex, mission-critical app, you can outsource your hosting and support to them. If you compare how much EY charges to what you'd pay for your own employees to do the same, not to mention the hardware, you'll find the cost of EY is pretty darn cheap. $.02 from a longtime EY watcher and future customer.
gleb 18y ago
The price premium reflects market perception that yes, it is. It's cool how you can argue whether that's true or not, but the market has spoken.
mdasen 18y ago
It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the web generally speaking. Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails and it's infrastructure that costs a lot of money. Examples: Remote Backups every 24 hours. That means a server in a different data center, the bandwidth, and the work involved in setting up and managing the backups. Remote website monitoring. That means a server in a different data center hitting the site to make sure nothing is down. Money and time to deal with that. Database replication. A large PITA is taken care of on your choice of MySQL 4/5 or PostgreSQL 8.2. If you add that together, the price doesn't seem as steep. Database replication means two boxes. The offsite backup adds another box and you could always stick the offsite monitoring on that same box. So, now you're at three boxes and I don't think it's crazy to be spending $300 on three boxes. Of course, with EngineYard, you don't have to do any of the setup work and you have the ability to scale more easily. In that setup, there is no load balancer so as you need more capacity, you then have to deal with a load balancer as well as another application server. The price is a bit of a premium, but not as much as you might think. Mostly, it's just more than what most developers are used to. I'm used to setting myself up on a slicehost slice. I don't have database replication, offsite monitoring, offsite backups, or hardware redundancy. If that box kicks, my site goes down until they can get it running on another box. It hasn't happened to me and I've been a customer for over a year, but it is a possibility. EngineYard is about eliminating those possibilities. That's expensive, but if you're trying to deploy a site that is your business and not your hobby, you should probably look at EngineYard. EngineYard is about being able to tell potential investors that they don't have to worry about architecture - and have the goods to back it up. I'm a decent sysadmin, but not like people for whom it's there job. I can get Apache, mod_rails, mongrel, nginx, etc. up and running, but sometimes you just want to know that things are set up solidly from people who have a lot more experience than you do.
swombat 18y ago
We're with EngineYard. I consider them to be cheap, for what they offer. I've never had a better host, ever. They are extremely responsive, 24x7. All communications are with expert geeks (no dumb first-line support). They know their stuff inside out. EngineYard are cheap if you compare it to the other available options of that calibre: 1) Do it all yourself.. to set up a similar set-up, with the performance, scalability and redundancy of their infrastructure, would cost much, much more both in hardware and in time. 2) Other comparable offerings from non-rails specialists like Rackspace actually added up to a whopping £6k/m - that was for the smallest possible solution for Rackspace. So yeah, EY are cheap. You don't use them for hosting your blog, you use them for hosting rails apps like kongregate or scribd - in that context, a few hundred bucks a month is peanuts.
Andys 18y ago
If you get friendly with engine yard, the price can be flexible, and they can also host things other than RoR apps ;-)
goodkarma 18y ago
I'm at the point where I am looking to move to EY for hosting an app. Spoke with a rep today, reviewing options before pulling the trigger. Appreciate the good words I am hearing here.

jharrison 18y ago

What EY does can't compare to your average VPS hosting and is absolutely not even close to shared hosting. If you poke around their site (looking at more than the price), you'll find a lot of information about the depth of their offering. They have a couple great graphics that really fill in some of the blanks. But, more than all of the great tech, you have a team of people that are passionate about what they do, which is to keep your app up and running while you're on the beach. Alright so maybe you're not on the beach but the point is that if you have a complex, mission-critical app, you can outsource your hosting and support to them. If you compare how much EY charges to what you'd pay for your own employees to do the same, not to mention the hardware, you'll find the cost of EY is pretty darn cheap. $.02 from a longtime EY watcher and future customer.

gleb 18y ago

The price premium reflects market perception that yes, it is. It's cool how you can argue whether that's true or not, but the market has spoken.

mdasen 18y ago

It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the web generally speaking. Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails and it's infrastructure that costs a lot of money. Examples: Remote Backups every 24 hours. That means a server in a different data center, the bandwidth, and the work involved in setting up and managing the backups. Remote website monitoring. That means a server in a different data center hitting the site to make sure nothing is down. Money and time to deal with that. Database replication. A large PITA is taken care of on your choice of MySQL 4/5 or PostgreSQL 8.2. If you add that together, the price doesn't seem as steep. Database replication means two boxes. The offsite backup adds another box and you could always stick the offsite monitoring on that same box. So, now you're at three boxes and I don't think it's crazy to be spending $300 on three boxes. Of course, with EngineYard, you don't have to do any of the setup work and you have the ability to scale more easily. In that setup, there is no load balancer so as you need more capacity, you then have to deal with a load balancer as well as another application server. The price is a bit of a premium, but not as much as you might think. Mostly, it's just more than what most developers are used to. I'm used to setting myself up on a slicehost slice. I don't have database replication, offsite monitoring, offsite backups, or hardware redundancy. If that box kicks, my site goes down until they can get it running on another box. It hasn't happened to me and I've been a customer for over a year, but it is a possibility. EngineYard is about eliminating those possibilities. That's expensive, but if you're trying to deploy a site that is your business and not your hobby, you should probably look at EngineYard. EngineYard is about being able to tell potential investors that they don't have to worry about architecture - and have the goods to back it up. I'm a decent sysadmin, but not like people for whom it's there job. I can get Apache, mod_rails, mongrel, nginx, etc. up and running, but sometimes you just want to know that things are set up solidly from people who have a lot more experience than you do.

swombat 18y ago

We're with EngineYard. I consider them to be cheap, for what they offer. I've never had a better host, ever. They are extremely responsive, 24x7. All communications are with expert geeks (no dumb first-line support). They know their stuff inside out. EngineYard are cheap if you compare it to the other available options of that calibre: 1) Do it all yourself.. to set up a similar set-up, with the performance, scalability and redundancy of their infrastructure, would cost much, much more both in hardware and in time. 2) Other comparable offerings from non-rails specialists like Rackspace actually added up to a whopping £6k/m - that was for the smallest possible solution for Rackspace. So yeah, EY are cheap. You don't use them for hosting your blog, you use them for hosting rails apps like kongregate or scribd - in that context, a few hundred bucks a month is peanuts.

Andys 18y ago

If you get friendly with engine yard, the price can be flexible, and they can also host things other than RoR apps ;-)

goodkarma 18y ago

I'm at the point where I am looking to move to EY for hosting an app. Spoke with a rep today, reviewing options before pulling the trigger. Appreciate the good words I am hearing here.