Hi
I have a project to host (production level - mid level traffic) that
has a predominantly UK audience. Currently I have a media temple grid
unit, but it’s performing badly here in the UK (extra ping time etc).
Can anyone recommend any rails hosts that have datacenters in the
UK ?
cheers
weepy
Feel free to ping our site www.speedyrails.com, it’s not on UK but if
ping time is good for you then you’re welcome 
On Feb 9, 10:47 am, “weepy” [email protected] wrote:
I have a project to host (production level - mid level traffic) that
has a predominantly UK audience. Currently I have a media temple grid
unit, but it’s performing badly here in the UK (extra ping time etc).Can anyone recommend any rails hosts that have datacenters in the
UK ?
This probably won’t help with your timeframe, but we’re getting so
much
interest from the UK we’ve decided to pursue a cluster in or around
London.
The C&W facility @ Swindon is delicious. 
We’re working hard and would like to begin service around 90 days from
now.
–
– Tom M.
– CTO, Engine Y.
I never heard Swindon described as ‘around London’ before now. Most
Londoners think the journey from Heathrow to Wapping is a bit much.
It’s not a big country and the pipes we have are pretty big. However
the cost of physical space and staff is still vastly cheaper in the
north of the country than the south. You might want to consider the
sheds in Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Nottingham, and
possibly even over the Irish Sea in Dublin. I can often get better
speeds to Ireland than to London.
Unless of course part of your pitch is to show customers the flashing
lights in which case you’d be better off in Docklands. Then they can
just get on the Tube to it.
NeilW
On 10 Feb, 06:29, “[email protected]” [email protected]
Sorry for the bad locality reference!
I seem to remember it was a 20 minute drive from London, but perhaps
it was longer…
Manchester is a viable option also, Ez, this is where I will be
hosting my upcoming service. Also, it’s only 45 minutes from me so
I’ll be able to do more hands on work with it if I have problems.
Jamie
On Feb 10, 6:29 am, “[email protected]” [email protected]
Hi Weepy,
I’ve been looking around for Rails hosting solutions in Ireland/UK the
last couple of weeks and there doesn’t appear to be many options over
here.
I’ve found that probably the best route to go is to get a VPS and
configure it to your needs. It’s more work and if you’re not
interested in getting involved in the sys admin side of things then it
may not be your cup of tea. Shared hosting is an absolute no-no for
Rails.
People on an Irish Ruby discussion group recommended http://
rimuhosting.com/ who have servers in the London area.
See http://groups.google.ie/group/ruby_ireland/browse_thread/thread/
4cdf17ce2be050bd?hl=en
A few other companies are recommended.
I have a VPS with http://www.xenplanet.com/ since last week. They’re
an Irish based crowd who are very good value with very helpful and
prompt support. They offer a pre-configured Rails OS image with
Apache/FastCGI but I took a plain Debian install and have setup
Apache2.2/Mongrel running on a 128 meg VPS and it’s working nicely.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Niall M.
http://www.4L.ie/
Shared hosting can be a yes-yes solution if it’s correctly managed 
and your site does not have a lot of traffic.
Our shared service at speedyrails.com is performing great, but the
secret is that we don’t oversell or overload our servers, we just have
around 24 mongrel instances per server and this works great. Of
course, as any shared service, one site can eat all the resources and
affect other customers, but this is not a problem of Rails, and we do
our best to avoid this using Monit.
Anyway, as Niall said, a VPS can also be a great solution if you like
and know about linux admin. In this case, I can also recommend
RimuHostig, in my beginnings, before creating SpeedyRails.com I used a
RimuHosting VPS (and still have it), their support is simply great.
Shared hosting can be a yes-yes solution if it’s correctly managed
and your site does not have a lot of traffic.
Our shared service at speedyrails.com is performing great, but the
secret is that we don’t oversell or overload our servers, we just have
around 24 mongrel instances per server and this works great. Of
course, as any shared service, one site can eat all the resources and
affect other customers, but this is not a problem of Rails, and we do
our best to avoid this using Monit.
Anyway, as Niall said, a VPS can also be a great solution if you like
and know about linux admin. In this case, I can also recommend
RimuHostig, in my beginnings, before creating SpeedyRails.com I used a
RimuHosting VPS (and still have it), their support is simply great.
Hi, All
Referring to the procedure of site updating:
In order to minimize site downtime closing of site seems to be be to
radical solution in reality to users.
There is an idea to keep site in state, where changes to DB aren
deprecated during the update.
During that time during the update this will be possible to do with
less rush the QA check, apply migrations, update the next version of
site.
Then to switch document_root of server (frontend+backends) to a new
updated copy.
Now to return back to rails, and to the question =)
It’s logical to create a general solution on the ActiveRecord level
that will not allow update, insert, delete.
At the same time controller should somehow know about this and render
some pretty view with maintenance content.
Is this logic correct?
How to correctly connect, i.e. how the model will let controller know
that the maintenance is going on right now?
Maybe there should be some exception in model, and controller will be
getting this kind of specific exception?
Best regards,
seem to be coming up again and again. of course the london server is
2x the price of the us version, but thats always going to be the case
Hi Niall, I truly understand you, I also had bad experiences with
shared hosts before creating speedyrails but I really think that
shared hosting is not as bad if it’s well managed and not over over
sold as unfortunately many hosting providers do. Of course, shared
hosting is not good for everybody, if you have a low traffic site of
simply a low budget project, going shared is not a bad decision is the
service is good.
Thank you for your kind words!
Regards
Maykel
Sorry didn’t mean to tar all shared Rails hosts with the same brush.
Have just had some bad experiences with shared hosts and Rails.
Sounds like you’ve got a good solution at speedyrails.com, best of luck
with it.
Regards,
Niall M.
http://www.4L.ie/
I have a project to host (production level - mid level traffic) that
has a predominantly UK audience. Currently I have a media temple grid
unit, but it’s performing badly here in the UK (extra ping time etc).Can anyone recommend any rails hosts that have datacenters in the
UK ?
The people behind WorkingWithRails.com do hosting. I know they host
some pretty big companies so they are probably pretty reliable.
Have you seen http://hosting.media72.co.uk they offer rails hosting and
are based in the UK, might be work looking at.
Hi weepy,
I have a project to host (production level - mid level traffic) that
has a predominantly UK audience. Currently I have a media temple grid
unit, but it’s performing badly here in the UK (extra ping time etc).
You are welcome to sign up for a free trial at http://en.railscluster.nl
in the Netherlands. Response times from Reading, England average 500 ms
for a full HTTP request. And since it’s free, there isn’t any risk
involved.
–
Roderick van Domburg
http://www.railscluster.nl
weepy wrote:
Hi
I have a project to host (production level - mid level traffic) that
has a predominantly UK audience. Currently I have a media temple grid
unit, but it’s performing badly here in the UK (extra ping time etc).Can anyone recommend any rails hosts that have datacenters in the
UK ?cheers
weepy
I am surprised nobody mentions BrightBox. They are a large uk based
player in hosting ruby on rails apps. I currently have several boxes
running with them and I love their setup. They have a very easy
deployment gem and fast mysql cluster.
Checkout a small writeup on
http://railsbookclub.com/hosting-ruby-on-rails-apps or visit brightbox
plan’s directly http://www.brightbox.co.uk/a/vcikd
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