I'm almost sold to Joyent SmartMachines. Even though is more expensive, it seems that the smaller machine can be faster than an EC2 instance.
What's your take on that? Are there any reasons why I should overpay for Joyent instead of an EC2 or any other host?
http://www.joyent.com/services/cloudhosting/
You can try an instance out for a day or two and just cancel your account. I ended up canceling my test instance but am thinking of trying it again to see how they did with the node stuff.
Frankly they are just as much of a pain in the butt to get everything working as before they were rebranded as SmartMachines from Accelerators or whatever they where called before Joyent bought textdrive.
I also find the documentation lacking compared to the excellent tutorials that slicehost provides and this is kind of a big deal if you are not familiar with Solaris.
see: http://wiki.joyent.com/all-accelerators:kb:start
vs: http://www.slicehost.com/community
I don't know what they have been doing for the last 5 years but it sure has not been working on their docs or writing their own nifty control panel software because they just install a skinned version of webmin for you. Yay, webmin...
They do claim to be faster than the other virtualization platforms like xen and it might be true because Solaris Zones are pretty sexy but again there is a learning curve and you have to use Solaris. EC2 and the other VM based hosting guys give you much more flexibility and if you just want to host rails then it's going to be about 100 times more of a pain[1] than just using Heroku. If I'm going to overpay I will take time saving vs a little performance any day.