[Rails] Re: Hosting costs for a small up!

On Friday, 9 November 2012 12:57:53 UTC-5, why-el wrote:

Hey friends! 

I am in the process of drafting a funding proposal to submit to my university and I have no idea what costs I should include for my Rails app. My application will open to my university's students. We are about 1600 students, so the app will handle few requests. The stack is a pretty standard one: Rails and Postgres, with probably some in-memory processing later on. I do however want to expand the application to few other schools so I expect the potential user base to grow. Still, I probably won't have over 1000+ or so users at best in the first year, which is what funding is for. 

How much do you think the costs will be? I tried Heroku but to be honest I am still confused by their choice of terminology and I also read that their costs go up fairly quickly. How about a virtual server somewhere? How viable is that solution for someone never managed a virtual server? 

Costs can go up pretty quick on Heroku, but your application doesn't sound like it would need a whole lot of resources. If nothing else, starting out on the free plans on Heroku will provide you with a better understanding of how much server you'll actually need.

Another potential downside to a plain virtual server (on places like Linode or EC2) is that you'll need to be able to configure the whole web stack - all you'll get from the company is a server instance that's running the Linux flavor of your choice that you can SSH into, everything else is up to you. An environment like Heroku gives you a pre-setup stack that you just push code to. That may or may not be better for you - if you've got lots of sysadmin experience and like to set up everything manually, Heroku will drive you crazy. On the other hand, if you're relatively unfamiliar with setting up a web stack (Apache / Passenger, for instance) and all the other services (outgoing mail, firewall, etc) then a plain virtual server could be a lot of extra effort.

--Matt Jones

 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails-talk/-/4ngvHOppHFQJ.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.