Rails hosting

A few weeks ago I migrated the Labrador Retriever Rescue web site from a shared hosting service at Bluehost to a virtual private server at Linode. My main motivation was to gain an element of control, including managing my Apache configuration, but I was also hoping to gain some performance improvements by getting away from Bluehost’s overloaded servers and FastCGI based Rails implementation (which isn’t fast).

Well, the performance improvements have certainly panned out better than expected! Here’s Google’s view of the site, taken from their Webmaster Tools page:

After the migration to Linode, page load times went from an average of 1.5 seconds per page, to an average of 0.2 seconds per page! Of course, this doesn’t come without a price. Bluehost charges $7 per month for hosting, while a Linode server is $17 per month (on a two-year plan). Linode is more than twice as expensive, but still a very reasonable price considering the many benefits.

Resources:
– Linode VPS
– Google Webmaster Tools