Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Contegix is Amazing. Plus Thoughts on Rails Hosting

I think I’ve raved before about our experiences at Seeking Alpha with Contegix for our hosting before, but I’m going to do it some more. As of late we’ve been having problems with our outgoing email for subscription being tarpitted or even blacklisted by certain well known public email companies. Obviously, this is a bad thing, and so last week our resident subscription specialiast (ie Jim) was doing a lot of frantic research and tweaking to make sure we did everything we could to show we are a legit in our massive email use, and not spammers. Throughout the whole ordeal, Contegix support was patient and always responded to our requests within minutes. Yes, literally minutes - if they need more time to read and research the issue, they’ll email you first to let you know they are working on the task. That kind of response really gives you security and trust in what they do.

Did I mention they completely overhauled our Rails staging environment, installing trac (0.10.3dev), apache 2.2.3, the latest versions of python, subversion, SWIG, and all required dependancies. This is all without anyone from Seeking Alpha having to touch SSH or a tarball. They even carried over our SVN post commit hooks and fastcgi - which I actually overlooked in the request but they noticed we still needed for the current test environment. Also had a SSL cert to secure svn and trac, migrate the repository, and everything just worked.

Their managed hosting starts at $325 a month, which you might think is a lot until you consider that they basically replace a full time sysadmin. Figure an entry level sysadmin starts at $40k/year, and you are saving at least a couple thousand a month right there on that salary. Contegix would suffice for most web companies that are below the youtube/myspace/yahoo level - ie if you are running a typical LAMP or Rails stack and just scaling up and clustering across machines, Contegix will be perfect for that.

My experiences with Contegix have made me question what I consider “quality” amongst VPS hosts. Granted, rimuhosting (my primary host) support has been good, and they have some scripts to get you up and running with Rails. Still, you definitely get the feeling that they want to help you get started and then only step in if you really break something. Can you expect more for $20 a month? Would it be possible for a VPS company to offer support anywhere near the Contegix level for, say, $50 a month? Engineyard and Rails Machine seem to have the managed hosting approach, but their prices are also more near the Contegix level. Maybe getting good people who can install a twenty point bleeding edge deployment recipe is just too expensive for the typical small VPS hosting company? Has anyone had experience with a VPS hosting company where they will just install everything, it just works, and you can just deploy and focus on development?

I have found http://slicehost.com/ to be the best choice for a Ruby developer. Good tutorials on their wiki for Rails setup on the Ubuntu server(Even though installing Rails on Ubuntu can hardly be called challenging) and they have an impressive Rails based management interface to your servers that even allows console access if you mess things up.

Thanks for the recommendation - I know I’ve checked out slicehost before. Is the support staff pretty responsive and helpful in getting some of the tougher things setup?

Well.. There is a Campfire chatroom that usually gives you good help. Either from the admins or other users.

But in all honesty I’ve never really needed help from them. I currently use the Litespeed webserver and there really isn’t much you need to do. So I really don’t know about their support system.

We have a 512MB slicehost account too, and I have to agree that slicehost offers very good value for what they are charging. However, I believe their VPS hosting is purely just hosting and no managed services. I think they do offer managed services, but there is no price listed for that.

Here’s the link for that: http://www.slicehost.com/managed-hosting

I believe most customers now are developers like myself that are willing to get deep into the water with setting up the production environment/server tweaks/admin etc..

Alfred: Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind getting into the guts of sysadmin/deployment. But if I could find a provider who would handle some or most of that for me so that I could concentrate on coding, I would jump at the chance. =)

So would you guys recommend sliced host as opposed to Contegix ?

I would like to add that you can easily compare many Rails hosting companies at Rails Hosting Info. I would also like to ask everyone to post a comment about his/her experience with any of these hosts, which makes it easier for others to find a good home for their Rails projects.