Hosting a Rails app has always been a bit of a pain. Standard shared hosting was always pretty much out of the question, so most people naturally migrated to some sort of VPS. The obvious upside of being able to do whatever you want is a big draw. However, there is a dark side to every VPS: sysadmin work. Updating with patches, installing software, setting file permissions, and all that plumbing takes a lot of time. Then, there’s the big-daddy of them all: managing your own SMTP server. Sure, turning on Postfix or Exim is pretty easy. I just hope you don’t mind it when all your emails disappear into spam boxes.
For Obsidian Portal, we have been happily hosting with Slicehost for a while. Their uptime has been great, and we appreciate their services like automated backup and DNS management. However, we have been handling all our sysadmin tasks ourselves. So, when Ryan recently met one of the representatives from Blue Box Group, and he said that they’re happy to handle all that for us (at no additional charge!), we were quite interested.
Since we’re currently spinning up DoLeaf, we decided it would be a good time to see what we can get with a more hands-on hosting provider. And, after just a few days, we’re very impressed.
Choice of Distro
Blue Box’s basic installation is some flavor of Red Hat. Ryan and I are Ubuntu guys, so this was a problem. A single email to the support staff: “Hey, can you rebuild our server with Ubuntu server edition?” Answer: “Yep, it’s done.” Awesome.
Firewall
Anyone else think iptables is a bit of a pain? I can use Firestarter or Webmin, but when I try to manage it manually, forget it. Luckily it only has to be done once. Or, in the case of BB, never. Just send an email with the ports you want open. They set it up and replied, plus added a few standard ports that we forgot.
Rails Stack
BB supports several different Rails stacks. We’re used to Apache2 + Ruby Enterprise Edition + Passenger + Rails 2.3.2 + MySQL 5. Even though this kind of setup is pretty straightforward, it always seems to take me at least 1-2 hours just to get things set up in the most basic configuration. Now? You guessed it. Send an email and I’m done.
Functioning SMTP – The Great White Whale
We’ve always had problems with emails disappearing en-route. Getting Postfix set up is a 5 minute job, but your emails randomly get flagged as spam, especially by the big boys like Google and Yahoo. There are many different ways to counter this, like SPF and DKIM, but they are a pain to set up, and it’s always tough to know if you got it correct. This was the tipping point for me with BB. They have an SMTP server preconfigured with SPF and DKIM and you can use it for sending emails from your app. They limit you to 750 emails / hour, which is way more than most apps need, especially in the beginning. Considering that we had evaluated similar solutions that wanted to charge $0.01 / email, having this included for free in our hosting plan was mind blowing. Never again will I host anywhere that doesn’t do this.
And the cost?
The most surprising thing is that I haven’t been charged $0.01 for additional support. I’m still testing the waters to see exactly where that line is, but so far, I haven’t hit it. Plus, their prices are quite competitive. Slicehost is a little bit cheaper, but when you factor in the time saved on setup, I’d say we’re already way ahead.
We’ve only just started with Blue Box, and things may go south at some point, but for now we’re ecstatic with what we’ve received. If you want to spend more time coding and less time on irritating sysadmin tasks, then I highly recommend taking a look!
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