Cheap hosting for Rails app?

[tommaxwell]

Building my first Rails app, and am coming to a realization that hosting will be a problem. Right now I'm freelancing full-time and just scraping by, so I don't have a ton of money to put into an app that won't be generating revenue anytime soon.

I set up the app on Heroku, and in a matter of ~1-2 weeks, I managed to get charged $75 for using the MemCachier add-on. I would like to be able to cache all my static assets with memcached.

I don't expect this app to generate any material traffic for awhile, it's still in development. What are the cheapest options out there?

[AznHisoka]

Go look into EngineYard - they have 500 free hours so you can shutdown your server when you don't expect any users to use your app. Otherwise, go buy yourself a dirt cheap VPS, or even OVH (their cheapest dedicated server plan is $40/month). Or.. just host it yourself. Yep, buy a 8 GB RAM PC quad core, and put in your basement. Sure it will be slow, but since it won't be generating traffic for awhile, who cares?

Second, why are you even prematurely optimizing by worrying about caching static assets? Wait until you actually have 100,000 users before doing that. You might even realize you don't even need it when that happens.

[ibstudios]

http://myhosting.com/ will be much cheaper with a linux vps. I get sub 100ms page loads with a sinatra app and redis hosted on myhosting.

[trekky1700]

If you're willing to manage everything yourself, DigitalOcean is awesome and cheap. I don't know about memcached though.

[palidanx]

If you have a vps box, you can easily install memcache and set the size on it (64 megs, 128 megs, 512 megs etc).

For static assets, are you referring to actual files being served? If that's the case, you don't have to put that in memcache. I would recommend putting it on a third party cdn (e.g. amazon s3).

[DarkStar851]

I run a small (dedicated) hosting environment with a few successfully deployed and running Ruby apps, I could setup a VPS and help with config if you're interested. Roll-your-own VPS usually works out best.

[DarkStar851]

As for caching, I'd suggest nginx proxying against unicorn with a cache store for static files. This is functionality built into nginx.

[kissrobber]

Sakura VPS 1GB RAM, 2 virtual core, 100GB HDD, about 10$ a month. http://vps.sakura.ad.jp/

[chipk]

+1 Webfaction - cheap, great docs & service, very solid technically.. really can't be beat for a simple, public dev/staging server.

[ioddly]

I'd just go with DigitalOcean and serve up the static assets with nginx until that is no longer tenable (longer than you think).

[Chetane]

Any reason why you're using memchache for your static assets? If not, put your static assets on S3 instead.

[tommaxwell]

No good reason in particular, someone recommended I do it.

[sairamkunala]

DigitalOcean is your option. For, static assets suggest you route through CloudFlare / self hosted ngnix.

[ddorian43]

Webfaction (shared hosting with 512MB dedicated ram)