Update: It turns out that a lot of folks are looking for this information. I'll do my best to keep this list updated as new hosts appear. Please drop me a line in the comments to tell me what I'm missing.

Update2: Nick Snels of RailsForum has put together an excellent app that automatically compares Rails hosts. Way to go Nick! RailsHostingInfo.

Note: This list is 100% devoid of affiliate links.

One of my clients has a site that just started picking up a lot of traction. We developed it on a Dreamhost shared account because that was simply the best starter option for hosting Rails apps. Dreamhost has been largely reliable and they clearly are the industry leaders in deploying massive shared hosting accounts with all the latest technologies and shell access. What they don't have is scalability for those of us who dislike the occasional 500 error and would like some resources actually dedicated to our use.

So my client has asked me to compile a list of the hosts that are the next level up from DH's exteremely cheap (under $100 for two years!) hosting. I'm going to grab a bunch of this data from a post on RailsForum, though I'll try to parse it in a more readable format:

Shared Hosts

Dreamhost

• $100 for two years (Google around for a special discount code)
• 1TB transfer
• 20GB space
• known for cheapness, high limits, and occasional errors/downtime

Site5

• $6.95/month for two years
• 200GB transfer
• 10GB space
• seems about like DH but many customers claim Site5 is more reliable.
• offers fewer accounts per server with higher-paying plans.

ASmallOrange

• $25/year
• 3GB transfer
• 75MB space
• This is the bare-minimal plan ASO offers but it's still more than more Rails sites will need.

PlanetArgon

• $11.25/month for one year
• 15GB transfer
• 500MB space
• can be configured to use: mongrel, lighttpd, pound, capistrano
• Planet Argon has been heavily involved in the Rails community, it's run by RobbyonRails

Textdrive

• $8.50/month for one year + $25 setup
• 3GB transfer
• 1GB storage
• 6 databases
• cannot be used for development or testing, only production
• I'm not as impressed with these guys as with some of their competition, but they're still in the running.

Rails Playground

• $5/month for one year
• 30GB transfer
• 3GB space
• These guys excel at being a good development ground, hence the name. This starter plan is probably great for folks who are looking for the simplest and easiest way to get their feet wet.

VPS Hosts

RailsMachine

• $75/month + $30 setup
• 100GB transfer
• 10GB space
• 256MB dedicated memory
• up to 6 Rails apps
• 2 unique IPs
• Perfect setup for a serious application. Just about the most stable and ideal setup. A little pricey, but well worth it.

RimuHosting

• $29.95/month
• 60GB transfer
• 4-8GB space
• 128MB memory
• Seems like an affordable VPS option

Engine Yard

• $249/month
• 125 GB transfer
• 15GB space
• memory: unclear
• A really novel approach. They have massive clusters and they sell 'slices' of those clusters. Easy to upgrade/downgrade but their base price is quite high.

SliceHost

• $20/month
• 100GB transfer
• 10GB space
• 256MB memory
• Very high value for the price. A complete VPS with plenty of memory for RAM-hogging Rails apps. Web panel gives you control to reboot (or reinstall!) on the fly for no additional cost.

I’ve tried out Typo for a while and it’s pretty nice but I’m hearing raves about Mephisto. I’m sheep-like enough to always follow coding trends so I can’t see any way out of trying Mephisto on for size.

The first thing that I saw on the installation instructions was that it doesn’t ship with all the required parts. You’ve got to check out Rails to the vendor directory (easy enough) and add at least one gem.

cd rails_app/vendor
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11738/tzinfo-0.3.0.tar.gz
tar xvzf tzinfo-0.3.0.tar.gz
rm tzinfo-0.3.0.tar.gz

A little migration, replacing the default .htaccess and dispatch.fcgi files with my customized ones, some short prayers that this process goes quickly and I don’t screw away my whole day on something I didn’t even plan to do, and it’s all done. Except that it’s not.

I’m not sure if this is the new cool thing to do or if it’s just a bad choice supported for legacy reasons, but you can’t use migrations on a fresh mephisto database. You’ve got to type `rake db:bootstrap` and it creates the tables and throws some default values in there. I’d prefer migrations, but whatever. At least it got done.

My first impressions are good, we’ll see how it goes finding a good theme.

After seeing Dreamhost killoff my fastcgi processes I’ve modified my dispatch.fcgi file in accordance with the suggestion on the dreamhost wiki. This is fully functional and you can (probably) just copy and past straight into your dispatch.fcgi file. The contents of the file are mostly just comments anyway, so this significantly simplified my dispatch file. Enough ado, here’s the code:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment" 
require 'fcgi_handler'

class RailsFCGIHandler
  private
  def fix_handler(signal)
    dispatcher_log :info, "asked to terminate immediately" 
    dispatcher_log :info, "fix handler working its magic!" 
    restart_handler(signal)
  end
  alias_method :exit_now_handler, :fix_handler
end

RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 10

Okay, it should be made clear that Rails couldn’t run on Dreamhost until I set the permissions on dispatch.fcgi (in the ‘public’ directory) to 755. Here’s the content of my dispatch.fcgi file:

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment"
require 'fcgi_handler'

RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 10

It took me all damn day to put Typo on Dreamhost. It turned out that 98% of my problems was a permissions problem with the public directory (chmod it to 755!).

So now I’ve got this thing going and it’s all set to be abandoned and forgotten. I’m thinking I need to jump on the chance to turn this into yet-another-failed-blog (YAFB) which starts with good intentions but ends the moment the creator realized they’re boring.