Engine Yard

It has been a few weeks now since we made the decision to use Engine Yard (EY) for our application hosting. I want to report that it is one of the smarter decisions that we have made since starting the company. We agonized about this decision for quite some time. We even thought about hosting it ourselves. (ugh)
There current pricing is about $399 for each slice per month. For a startup, that is not insignificant, especially since we needed at least two slices.

For those of you that are new to virtual hosting. A slice is roughly equivalent to one server. We currently have two slices. These two slices will be more than enough horsepower for awhile. It is mostly a good problem if we need to add slices. That will mean that we either have lots of users or we have a performance problem. Hopefully the former. :)

Regarding the price for EY... Tom Mornini, the CTO of EY, and I had a nice conversation right before we signed up. He said one thing that sealed the deal for me. It went something like this - "Most EY customer think of EY as very reasonable IT services with hosting thrown in for free". This has turned out to be a very accurate. EY encourages you to call / submit a ticket at any time and as often as you need to. They are staffed around the globe so you can contact them 24/7 and usually get response within the hour, often sooner. The EY staff really knows their stuff. I have yet to get the "I am not sure" answer. All quality people from my experience.

Since our entire product is offered via the web, it was keeping me awake at night worrying if our services/application are running. Now I can sleep knowing that someone at EY is awake somewhere worrying about that.

If you are looking for Ruby on Rails application hosting look no further. Engine Yard is your best choice IMHO.

Note: I was not paid for this referral and have no ownership in EY. :)