Yesterday i got a phone call from one of my clients, very annoyed by the fact he wasn’t able to neither read his mails nor browse the website.

Just a few weeks ago we encountered the same issue. So now i had a hunch that it was the server`s firewall which blocked his IP address because of reaching the maximum number of failed login attempts.

I`ve sent an e-mail to Site5`s support asking about the problem and a reply. The answer, came in 4 minutes!

Amazing reply time!

Company name: Site5

Features: Ruby on Rails, SSH, FastCGI, Switchtower/Capistrano and Subversion, generous space and bandwidth

Money back guarantee: Yes, 60 days

Starting a web development company and delivering professional results to your clients, depends to a rather high extent on reliable and fast hosting services. Most of the times, you’ll have to cater for all your clients’ needs like thoroughly understanding their projects and up to deploying and maintaining them. You might also consider building a couple of business portals, web directories or even small scale social networking websites which could prove very lucrative in the long run.

If you’re young or simply your hosting budget simply cannot accommodate a dedicated server at this time, you might consider one of the many shared or reseller hosting accounts available, from the myriad of providers out there. But that’s really the problem with these providers, there are so many and the information available is usually biased or fake. I’ve tried more than a half a dozen providers, in little over a year, so i know it can be a stressful task, especially if you’ve got a tight schedule or high expectations from your customers. There really isn’t much space for mistakes, as a poor choice can come back to bite you.

Back in autumn, we switched to Ruby on Rails from Asp.net 2.0. It was a risky move, but it paid off, since its flexibility and ease of use proved to suit our clients needs and time constraints better. Imagine learning a new technology in less than a month, while developing production ready websites and also having to find a reliable hosting provider. As expected, we chose a crappy hosting service. There’s no point in giving names, but for some reason they were charging us for SSH access on every website hosted and at that point they were still not using FastCGI. That meant page loading times of 10 up to 40 seconds, which is unacceptable according to today’s standards.

Luckily about a month or so we decided we had enough and started searching for an alternative. Actually, we reverted to our second original choice, Site5.com. Almost half a year after that, we’re still happily using their services. There are quite a few reasons why i think Site5 is a good shared or reseller web hosting provider and definitely one of the best when it comes to Ruby on Rails.

First off, i really like their client service. It might be true that i hardly find the Live Help feature on, but other than, that i got useful answers in a timely manner to all my problems. I even had them help us at times with advice regarding configuration, which went beyond their duties. Also the website holds a rather extensive documentation, which should come in handy when searching for an answer. We all know how frustrating it can be to wait for hours for an answer from your provider while your clients are emailing you like crazy. That’s why responsive client service can save you a lot of time and headaches.

While we’re still learning, we’ve found SSH access to be quite useful. In just a couple of minutes, you could configure a Ruby on Rails server and upload the website files. Also, being Linux based, you have a choice between Ruby on Rails and PHP, so you could just as easy set up a Wordpress blog. Also cPanel and WHM Control Panel are both good configuration tools and a little easier to use than Plesk. I’ll probably take advantage of the Switchtower/Capistrano and Subversion features which we still haven’t come around to learning.

Then, there’s the generous space and bandwidth constraints. This could really support a few medium size traffic websites and a lot of small size presentation websites for your clients, even if they are heavy on multimedia content. Given the low prices, you could end up supporting your account costs from just a couple of clients. At this point, we could easily switch to a dedicated server based on the revenues we’re getting. But what’s the point in doing that, when we can cut down costs with up to $300 a month, and still have the same results.

Loading times are great, which is impressive considering we’re talking about external, long range, bandwidth. Having around 3-4 seconds for the first page and under two seconds for the rest of the pages of database intensive websites it’s really a good level of performance.

There are many other nice features on Site5 which you could discover for yourselves. And if by any chance they don’t come through, you still have the 60 days Money Back Guarantee option. But let’s face it you should have a clear idea of their services by the second month.

Hope this will help you save some time and a lot of googling while searching for a good Ruby on Rails web hosting provider. Good luck and lots of good work!