Re: FN-FORUM: Ruby on Rails UK hosting

date posted 7th November 2007 16:37

From: "Cliff Rowley" [EMAIL REMOVED]
>
> Hey folks,
>
> Prompted by the recent discussion of hosting .co.uk domains in another
> country, this has got me thinking about my current project. The current
> plan is to host cheap in another country, potentially the USA since
> hosting is already cheap and the exchange rate falls heavily in our
> favour..
>
> However now I'm not so sure. The site on which I am working is UK only,
> and it is important that it falls into UK only search results. So now I
> am rethinking the hosting plan and wondered if anyone knows of a decent
> (and cheap!) hosting provider that supports Ruby on Rails. At this stage
> scalability is not a massive concern because I don't believe the site
> will ever receive a super high volume of hits. Partly because of a
> number of decisions the client has made, and partly because of the market
> to which the site is targeted.
>
> Any ideas? :-)

Bytemark? I host RoR there. Guys there are helpful and good to deal with. No
live support after 6pm or at weekends, though email support is good.

HOWEVER (as in big flashing red letters)... RoR comes in two varieties:
development server and release. Some hosts DO NOT know all they should to
enable RoR hosting, confusing the two environments. Next, RoR tends to go
hand-in-hand with Subversion. I have wasted a lot of time installing it,
where hosts that say they provide RoR have an awful time installing Svn,
especially on Debian it seems. Next, hosts are much more clued up in the
USA - really put our hosts to shame. However (reverting to the SEO issue)
under no circumstances should a company specific domain name like .co.uk be
hosted outside that country if you care about online search results.

As for that last issue, for those that would like to prove the issue, try
this. Buy two .co.uk domains with similar names and set them up on cheap
hosts, one here and one in USA. Set up identical Wordpress blogs with the
same titles, headings and content (because Wordpress is excellent for
testing SEO effectiveness). Check every day with identical searches on
different search engines - see which one does best!

HTH...

Mike A.