I have wrote previously that I have started work on my first commercial application using ruby on rails. The choice of language affects couple of other factors. One of them is hosting. The hosting could be a bit pricey and specially if you are like me and you want to do things properly from start.
I have already decided to go for cloud computing because it advantages to adjust the resources on the fly as your app grows bigger. If you do not know what cloud computing is let me give you small example. Let’s imagine that you have your application up and running and you get more then thousand active users. The application might get slower because of hardware resources on your server. With cloud computing you can add more RAM or HD in a few minutes. In case you end up with less users in the future and you do not need all those resources you can scale back to your original configuration.
There are couple of big players on the cloud server market. The biggest one are Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. The Rackspace prices looks really great. I really wanted to go with them but what put me off is the fact they do not provide any pre-build packages for server installations and I could not really find any open source projects as well. On the other hand Amazon EC2 is lot more expensive, I mean if you want to go for the cheapest option, but there is quite a few of pre-build packages which makes your life lot easier if you are not the “server guy” even you still need to be to install and configure it. Talking expensive here might sound funny for companies who used to pay hundreds of pounds for the same type of services before. It will only cost about 20-30 pounds/month for the smallest instance which might be a lot for individuals but it should be just fine for small companies.
Both of these companies has been on the market for a while and they have managed to establish very good name, they are very reliable. They both come with they own versions of file storage services. I already use Amazon S3 services for backing up my Mac as well as all of my databases. There is no cost for moving stuff inside Amazon network – from EC2 to S3 and I am guessing it will be the same for Rackpace.
I have pretty much made my mind. I will be using EC2. They offer an option where you can reserve server for 1 to 3 years. You pay the basic price at the beginning and then you pay monthly costs for running the instance. Specially the fact that I can just grab a package which includes app ache, rails, mysql together with other tools and install it as one made my decision in this case. I have managed to install all I need on my MAC but I want to be sure that all the stuff is properly configured and secure because I am not specialist in that field. I am also considering security audit before launching the application so I am sure that the customer’s data are well protected.