Slingshot Hosting Rules the School

posted by pete on May 25th, 2007

We didn’t count on CBQ and the Slingshot Hosting team being so available and helpful that they have assisted with RMagick compilation, troubleshooted interactions between mongrel and the amazon_s3 gem, and CBQ coming home from a party to restart a panicking box. It might sound like we’re raving here, but I’d take bullets for these guys at this point, because I get the feeling they are taking them for us.

Deployment in the Rails world evolves quickly, and we’ve felt the pain of trying every variation of FCGI, mongrel, apache, lightTPD, and more are on the way. In the process we’ve tried about five different hosting scenarios, all of which promised things that they couldn’t deliver. We’re programmers, not sysadmins; we are too realistic to expect a 100% set-it-and-forget-it deployment for a complex system, but we really don’t want to have to spend time worrying about whether our servers are secure or what packages are installed. We need to partner with people who really get Rails and are as passionate about keeping it running as we are about building it.

We decided to try working with Slingshot Hosting because one of their principals is Charles Brian Quinn, and his reputation preceeds him. Slingshot offers an affordable rate for a range of managed hosting dedicated boxes running CentOS. The keyword here is managed because in the hosting world it can mean just about anything from them monitoring their network for traffic spikes that they could bill for, to actually keeping the machine patched for security holes. We hoped for the latter and crossed our fingers.

We didn’t count on the Slingshot team being so available and helpful that they have assisted with RMagick compilation, troubleshooted interactions between mongrel and the amazon_s3 gem, and CBQ coming home from a party to restart a panicking box. It might sound like we’re raving here, but I’d take bullets for these guys at this point, because I get the feeling they are taking them for us.

Anyhow, today we got an email from Charles out of the blue:

Hello Unspace,

First, thanks for being great customers at Slingshot Hosting. We’re working to improve the quality of our offerings, and since you guys are our bestest, bestest customers, we’re looking to you to find out what it is that you need or want.

We know that our clients love the ability to order a server, and get a fully working capistrano recipe file complete with management of the entire setup of the servers, rails application, and crontab.

We’re working (today) on building a slingshot (hosting) gem that provides automated s3 backups, full monit monitoring from the start, and other goodies, but wanted to know if you guys have any issues or anything at all that you want or need.

Feel free to call me, or e-mail, or IM/skype chat if you get a moment.

We’re also revamping the Slingshot Hosting web page to reflect our current offerings and ease of use. We would love to do a profile of Unspace Interactive and how smart folks, like yourselves, use our service to deliver quality, reliable, easy to maintain Rails applications. If you’d allow this, we’d be honored.

Also, if Hampton and Jeff didn’t already mention, they totally rocked RailsConf, and if I recall correctly, were approached by Rails core to keep them updated on the status of the plugin for consideration to Rails core. Totally awesome stuff.

Thanks guys, – Charles Brian Quinn

Are you kidding me? Wow.

Anyhow, people are constantly asking us how to deploy their production apps. We recommend Slingshot Hosting.