RobbieAllen.com > Blog

I continue to get a few emails asking what I’ve done since I reported problems with my web hosting provider Joyent. After quite a bit of research, I narrowed down my options to Engine Yard and SliceHost. Both companies have pretty good reputations in the Rails community. Engine Yard is a high end hosting provider and their price reflects it. They provide hands on support including help with initial configuration and installation in addition to ongoing support. If money was not an issue, I would have definitely gone with EY, but it is. SliceHost on the other hand offers more of a DIY model. They are similar to Joyent in that regard, but they are 1) less expensive, 2) offer a variety of UNIX platforms to choose from (Joyent uses Solaris) and 3) have much better documentation.

I picked SliceHost and have been a happy customer so far.

My main problem with Joyent was with IO. There would be periods where the shared storage would slow to a complete crawl. And to make it worse, Joyent had difficulty in telling me the root cause (often pointing the finger at my app). Since I moved to SliceHost, I’ve had zero IO issues. In fact, I don’t have any issues to report. I’m running Ubuntu, mongrel, and nginx and my new layered architecture will allow me to scale easier in the future.