So, I’ve decided I want to build things. What better way to do this than learning Ruby on Rails? Also, it gives me an excuse to have this awesome blog.
First things first, I decided to get myself a proper Ruby on Rails (RoR) hosting provider. It seems the resourceful denizens of the internet have found various hacks and methods for working with RoR on many of the popular hosting services, such as 1and1 or Go Daddy. I decided not to settle for any hackery. I wanted the real deal– while these hacks can enable many rails features, you won’t be able to work with the latest versions, and you won’t have access to much of the infrastructure that RoR works best with. In my pursuit for a proper RoR host, I found Hosting Rails. I was enticed by the fact that it won the distinction of “Overall Best Option” on the seemingly reputable looking railshosting.org site. I headed on over and was thrilled to see a basic hosting package that was completely free for the first year! I signed up immediately. Only after entering my credit card info and hitting “Submit” did I have the insight to look up some more reviews of Hosting Rails. A quick Google search found that a lot of people are not very happy. Apparently they used to be a great hosting company, but after having been bought out sometime in 2010, they’ve declined in quality. The original review on railshosting.org that attracted me in the first place seems very out of date– that whole site does not seem to have been updated in a while.
I tried to cancel my account at Hosting Rails, only to find out that I am only able to cancel during the month before it renews. Since I got 1 year of free service, I can expect an email 11 months from now saying that my account is about to automatically renew and charge the credit card they have on file a hefty bill. If I remember any of this 11 months from now, I hope I cancel in time to avoid this ridiculous charge. Another interesting thing to note is that I have reason to believe that they do not escape characters in your account password field. Don’t ask how I know this :) . They are certainly not the only company that fails to do this. When you make an account with Seagate to remotely access your NAS, they also forget to escape characters in your password entry field while failing to tell users that certain characters should not be used. Both of these events have led me to hours of frustration (not to mention the possible security risks!).
I decided to go with Rails Playground. They won the distinction of “Great Reliability and Support” over at our trusty, tragically out-of-date friend railshosting.org. This time, I checked other reviews before buying. With plans starting at $5 a month and great reviews, it seemed like I didn’t have much to lose. So far, everything seems great. I’ll have more to say on this later.
1 comment