4 ms·

Ask HN: What is a good way to host a Rails app for free? Or very cheap?

11 points by benigeri 14y ago

This is for a personal website. Heroku's free tier sucks because servers take 5-10 seconds to spin up every time they are used. Amazon EC2 isn't working out for me either. Any advice?

bgdam 14y ago
Linode. The 20USD/month plan is guaranteed to meet your needs, and their service and support are top notch. The LISH shell is also really really useful - esp. if you are new to sysadmin stuff, and has saved my ass a lot of times. Their collection of tutorials on sysadmin stuff is another huge benefit.
nXqd 14y ago
Can i have a question why Amazon EC2 doesn't work for you ?
- mikeevans 14y ago
  Might not be a technical issue, maybe his free tier ran out? After that, a micro instance isn't really that cheap anymore.
  - benigeri 14y ago
    Yeah its a technical issue. I've been trying to set it up for the past couple days with rubber, its not worked once.
    - nanijoe 14y ago
      Elastic Beanstalk now supports rails..use that, and you should be up and running in a few hours. http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-Ruby-Applications-to-AWS-Elastic-Beanstalk-with-Git http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-Ruby-...
gtmtg 14y ago
OpenShift and AppFog are two PAASs I've used that both support Rails. Their free tiers will be more than adequate for a personal website.
- benigeri 14y ago
  I'm going to try those next, thanks.
caw 14y ago
You could check out lowendbox for cheap VPS. I had one for a year, only paid $50 for a 512MB Xen VPS. It ran a low volume rails site just fine. I did have to do a trick with mysql, and that was to disable TCP in MySQL and only use the local socket (/tmp/mysql.sock). That reduces the memory footprint of mysqld significantly.
bmelton 14y ago
Dotcloud[1] is ideal for this sort of thing (to me). If it's a production app and you're just looking for a free/cheap ride, you might need to look elsewhere, but if the complaint is that the spinup time is too slow during development, I would definitely look into Dotcloud, which lets you have development instances free, and only production apps are charged.
- benigeri 14y ago
  Might actually work for my site. I don't need a big or fast db as I will be the only one using the rails interface. External users are just served non-interactive pages.
Donito 14y ago
What's the problem with the 5-10 seconds wake up time in Heroku? This does NOT happen every time they are used, it only happens ONCE every an hour or more of inactivity. This limitation becomes problematic however if your app has cron jobs every so often, or states (e.g. node app).
- benigeri 14y ago
  It's fine for developing but I want to have this as something I can send to employers and friends. I don't want them to have to wait up to 10s to see a site that I spend a lot of time trying to speed up lol
  - muellerwolfram 14y ago
    there is a way around that. just install the new relic addon, and configure it to check your sites availability once every minute.(on a production site you want that anyway to get alerts if the app is down, and might need a restart) like Donito said, it only needs to wake up if there hasn't been a request in over an hour -> which will never happen with the new relic addon, because it sends a request every minute.
padseeker 14y ago
FREE: appfog - https://www.appfog.com/ https://www.appfog.com/ dotcloud - http://dotcloud.com http://dotcloud.com CHEAP: webbynode, $15 entry level plan - http://webbynode.com http://webbynode.com digital ocean, $5 entry level plan - https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ I've used appfog and it works alright. I am a paying customer for webbynode and like it a lot. Easy to deploy, ssh access, flexibility. $15 might be more than you want to pay, I've not tried digital ocean, but it seems like a nice entry level price point.
- callmeed 14y ago
  I like Digital Ocean (use them for http://bngal.com http://bngal.com and http://cheergram.com http://cheergram.com) but be warned: I wasn't even able to compile nginx on the $5 plan. Kept getting memory-related errors. YMMV
EdwardMSmith 14y ago
When I had a rails app on Heroku (a while ago), I solved that by setting up a free Pingdom account to ping a full stack (hit the DB, hit any external services I was using) "heartbeat" route. I'm not sure if this works any more, though - they may have done something to work around it.
swanson 14y ago
Heroku with 3 unicorn workers + NewRelic uptime pings
- 1123581321 14y ago
  Pingdom or even a cronjob also works.
reiz 14y ago
Another solution is CloudControl: https://www.cloudcontrol.com/for-developers https://www.cloudcontrol.com/for-developers. This is a provider from Berlin / Germany.
hectormalot 14y ago
http://www.cloudvps.com/ http://www.cloudvps.com/ A Dutch company that I've used for the last 18 months to run my VPS without issues. It also provides VPS's to the largest online accounting software company here (Exact software) has reasonable customer support 11 Euro (14 dollars) a month for: 1GB Ram, 20 GB HDD, 250 GB traffic and a single core. If you want even cheaper you could try hetzner.de with 8 euro/month, 512MB VPS.

11 points by benigeri 14y ago

This is for a personal website. Heroku's free tier sucks because servers take 5-10 seconds to spin up every time they are used. Amazon EC2 isn't working out for me either. Any advice?

bgdam 14y ago

Linode. The 20USD/month plan is guaranteed to meet your needs, and their service and support are top notch. The LISH shell is also really really useful - esp. if you are new to sysadmin stuff, and has saved my ass a lot of times. Their collection of tutorials on sysadmin stuff is another huge benefit.

nXqd 14y ago

Can i have a question why Amazon EC2 doesn't work for you ?

mikeevans 14y ago
Might not be a technical issue, maybe his free tier ran out? After that, a micro instance isn't really that cheap anymore.
- benigeri 14y ago
  Yeah its a technical issue. I've been trying to set it up for the past couple days with rubber, its not worked once.
  - nanijoe 14y ago
    Elastic Beanstalk now supports rails..use that, and you should be up and running in a few hours. http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-Ruby-Applications-to-AWS-Elastic-Beanstalk-with-Git http://ruby.awsblog.com/post/Tx2AK2MFX0QHRIO/Deploying-Ruby-...

gtmtg 14y ago

OpenShift and AppFog are two PAASs I've used that both support Rails. Their free tiers will be more than adequate for a personal website.

benigeri 14y ago
I'm going to try those next, thanks.

caw 14y ago

You could check out lowendbox for cheap VPS. I had one for a year, only paid $50 for a 512MB Xen VPS. It ran a low volume rails site just fine. I did have to do a trick with mysql, and that was to disable TCP in MySQL and only use the local socket (/tmp/mysql.sock). That reduces the memory footprint of mysqld significantly.

bmelton 14y ago

Dotcloud[1] is ideal for this sort of thing (to me). If it's a production app and you're just looking for a free/cheap ride, you might need to look elsewhere, but if the complaint is that the spinup time is too slow during development, I would definitely look into Dotcloud, which lets you have development instances free, and only production apps are charged.

benigeri 14y ago
Might actually work for my site. I don't need a big or fast db as I will be the only one using the rails interface. External users are just served non-interactive pages.

Donito 14y ago

What's the problem with the 5-10 seconds wake up time in Heroku? This does NOT happen every time they are used, it only happens ONCE every an hour or more of inactivity. This limitation becomes problematic however if your app has cron jobs every so often, or states (e.g. node app).

benigeri 14y ago
It's fine for developing but I want to have this as something I can send to employers and friends. I don't want them to have to wait up to 10s to see a site that I spend a lot of time trying to speed up lol
- muellerwolfram 14y ago
  there is a way around that. just install the new relic addon, and configure it to check your sites availability once every minute.(on a production site you want that anyway to get alerts if the app is down, and might need a restart) like Donito said, it only needs to wake up if there hasn't been a request in over an hour -> which will never happen with the new relic addon, because it sends a request every minute.

padseeker 14y ago

FREE: appfog - https://www.appfog.com/ https://www.appfog.com/ dotcloud - http://dotcloud.com http://dotcloud.com CHEAP: webbynode, $15 entry level plan - http://webbynode.com http://webbynode.com digital ocean, $5 entry level plan - https://www.digitalocean.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/ I've used appfog and it works alright. I am a paying customer for webbynode and like it a lot. Easy to deploy, ssh access, flexibility. $15 might be more than you want to pay, I've not tried digital ocean, but it seems like a nice entry level price point.

callmeed 14y ago
I like Digital Ocean (use them for http://bngal.com http://bngal.com and http://cheergram.com http://cheergram.com) but be warned: I wasn't even able to compile nginx on the $5 plan. Kept getting memory-related errors. YMMV

EdwardMSmith 14y ago

When I had a rails app on Heroku (a while ago), I solved that by setting up a free Pingdom account to ping a full stack (hit the DB, hit any external services I was using) "heartbeat" route. I'm not sure if this works any more, though - they may have done something to work around it.

swanson 14y ago

Heroku with 3 unicorn workers + NewRelic uptime pings

1123581321 14y ago
Pingdom or even a cronjob also works.

reiz 14y ago

Another solution is CloudControl: https://www.cloudcontrol.com/for-developers https://www.cloudcontrol.com/for-developers. This is a provider from Berlin / Germany.

hectormalot 14y ago

http://www.cloudvps.com/ http://www.cloudvps.com/ A Dutch company that I've used for the last 18 months to run my VPS without issues. It also provides VPS's to the largest online accounting software company here (Exact software) has reasonable customer support 11 Euro (14 dollars) a month for: 1GB Ram, 20 GB HDD, 250 GB traffic and a single core. If you want even cheaper you could try hetzner.de with 8 euro/month, 512MB VPS.