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Comment by pius | Hacker News Reader

If you're comfortable administering a Linux slice, consider Slicehost ($20/month). If you're just learning, Heroku might be a great option.

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I don't even know what a Linux slice is ;)

I'm checking out Heroku, which seems appropriate for my level. Gracias though.

I don't even know what a Linux slice is ;)

It's basically a full Linux server, except it's really a virtual machine running on something else. That's just an implementation detail, though.

Anyway, I use Slicehost and the service is great. Very easy to manage via their web interface, and the price is not bad. $10/month for daily and weekly full backups is also a plus. If I fuck up the server miserably, I just press a few buttons and I am back to last night's unfucked version.

I haven't used them yet, but they look like exactly what I'm looking for in a host.

The only downside is that they only accept credit card payments, but considering what they are offering it's not that big of a deal.

Don't worry. You don't need to know what a "Linux slice" is because it's a term barely used by anyone except Slicehost customers. You'll more commonly see such systems referred to as "virtual private servers" or VPSes.

Heck, this very page is #3 on Google for "linux slice" which shows how little the term is used ;-)

If you go with Slicehost and are iffy with your sysadmin skills, take a look at deprec/capistrano, tools that let someone smarter than you handle your sysadmin stuff (at the cost of keeping you ignorant).

But most definitely look at Webmin and Virtualmin; they might be installed already for you on slicehost.

This is a good point. You might want to use passenger if you lack sysadmin skills. The big pain of Rails is keeping your thin/mongrel/etc processes running, etc. I imagine a slicehost $20/month slice would run passenger mod_rails just fine and would be fine for your hobby project or something small.

To be clear, it is important to learn how to install Ruby on Rails (or really any package) on a Linux system. deprec and friends are great... until you want some crazy extension that they can't provide for you.

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