Rails Web Hosting: What Actually Worked For Me

Posted bypettnerdaros

I build and run small Rails apps for real people. Parents. Cafe owners. My neighbors. I don’t want drama when I hit “deploy.” Here’s how hosting went for me, with real wins and a few bruises I still remember.

What I ran (so you know the shape of it)

  • A PTA sign-up app (Rails 7, Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Action Mailer).
  • A small cafe order board (Rails 7, Action Cable for live updates, Active Storage to S3).
  • A mood board side project (Rails 7, background jobs, image processing with libvips).

Nothing huge. But not toy apps either.

Heroku: Fast setup, fair price, and no headaches

My PTA app landed on Heroku first. I pushed my repo, added the Ruby buildpack, and clicked Postgres and Redis add-ons. I set env vars, ran migrations, and that was that.

What I liked:

  • I didn’t babysit SSL. The green lock just worked.
  • Logs were easy to scan. Release phase tasks ran clean.
  • The scheduler add-on handled my daily email job.

What bugged me:

  • Costs crept up with add-ons. Not wild, but you feel it.
  • If you pick a plan that sleeps, the first hit can be slow. Parents will text you, “Is it broken?” It’s not. It’s just yawning.

Did it ever bite me? Once. I scaled my worker down to zero by mistake. Sidekiq jobs piled up like dishes. I clicked one button to bring the worker back. Ten minutes later, the queue was clear. Simple fix, but a very “oops” moment.

Bottom line: when I need easy, I still reach for Heroku. It buys me calm.

Render: Feels like Heroku, but I kept more control

For the cafe board, I used Render. I connected GitHub, set env vars, and set up a web service and a worker for Sidekiq. I clicked “PostgreSQL” and “Redis,” and it wired itself up.

Good stuff:

  • Free TLS and straight domain setup.
  • Health checks caught a bad deploy before it went live.
  • Background worker and cron jobs were smooth.

Not so fun:

  • When the build cache reset, the next build took ages. Coffee break time.
  • The free tier naps. Paid tiers don’t, so I paid.

A small win: Action Cable ran fine without any Nginx tricks. The order board flickered to life in the browser like it should. The barista smiled, which is rare before 7 a.m.

If you're weighing Render against Fly more thoroughly, this side-by-side comparison does a nice job outlining the trade-offs.

Fly.io: Close to users, fast websockets, tiny bills

My mood board app lives on Fly.io. I ran “fly launch,” used my Dockerfile, and picked a region near my crew. Websocket chat felt snappy. I added a small Postgres app in the same region and pinned a volume.

Things I loved:

  • Low latency. It felt local.
  • It scaled to zero for a staging app and woke up fast.
  • Price felt kind. You can start small and stay small.

What made me sigh:

  • Networking tripped me once. I shipped an image built on my M1 Mac. It defaulted to arm64, but the image ran on amd64. Boom, weird crash. I fixed it by building for linux/amd64 and pushed again.
  • The first time I messed with fly.toml, I mis-typed the internal URL for Postgres. The app said “connection refused.” It was me. It’s always me.

For websockets and folks spread out across the map, Fly felt great.

Hatchbox + DigitalOcean: Roll your own, but with training wheels

When I wanted more control, I used Hatchbox to manage a DigitalOcean droplet. It set up Nginx, Puma, deploy keys, and Let’s Encrypt. It gave me buttons for “Deploy,” “Env,” and “Rollback.” It felt like Capistrano with manners.

Why I stayed:

  • Deployment was one click. Rolling restarts were calm.
  • Sidekiq ran as a system service. No screen sessions to babysit.
  • I used a Managed Postgres from DigitalOcean, which made backups easy.

What I had to handle:

  • Patching. I ran apt updates and watched disk space.
  • Node and bundler versions. When Rails 7 wanted a newer esbuild, I had to nudge the server.
  • libvips. Image processing failed on day one. I ssh’d in and installed libvips. After that, thumbnails worked.

Money talk: this setup was the cheapest for steady traffic. But it does ask for a little care. Not much. Just enough to remind you the server is real.

Real bumps, real fixes

  • The “missing libvips” facepalm: Active Storage uploads failed on my droplet. I installed libvips and re-deployed. Fixed in five minutes, but I felt silly.
  • Cron that didn’t run: On Render, my daily cleanup job failed because I forgot RAILS_ENV in the cron command. I added it. Next day, all clear.
  • Slow first hit: On a sleeping plan, my PTA app took 7–10 seconds to wake. I moved to a plan that stayed awake during school hours. Folks stopped calling it “broken.”

Costs I actually paid (rough, and they change)

  • Heroku for the PTA app: about the price of a casual dinner per month once I added Postgres, Redis, and a worker. Worth it for zero fuss.
  • Render for the cafe: a little less than Heroku for similar resources. Paid plan, no naps.
  • Fly.io for the mood board: the lowest of the three. Two tiny machines and a small Postgres were still kind to my wallet.
  • Hatchbox + DigitalOcean: the best value long-term. Droplet + managed Postgres + Hatchbox fee still came in below PaaS, but I did the upkeep.

I’m being vague on purpose. Prices change. Your scale matters. But the pattern held.

Who should pick what?

  • New to Rails or in a rush? Heroku. You’ll ship today.
  • Need a Heroku-ish feel with nice pricing? Render. It’s friendly.
  • Want low latency and real-time? Fly.io. Websockets feel crisp.
  • Want control and a lower bill? Hatchbox on a VPS. Just keep a tiny checklist for patches and backups.
  • Looking for a lean VPS with upfront pricing? I’ve had smooth sails on WebSpaceHost as well.

Need even more alternatives? Check out this curated roundup of the top Ruby on Rails hosting providers for additional ideas.

While we're on the topic of niche projects: some of the most demanding Rails hosting headaches crop up when you’re serving geo-targeted, user-generated content at scale. A live example worth poking at is FuckLocal Wives—analysing how its location-aware matching and constant media uploads stay performant under load can give you practical benchmarks for architecting and stress-testing your own Rails deployment. Similarly, city-specific classified platforms push hosting stacks in interesting ways; take the rebuilt Backpage Joplin as a case study—browsing it lets you see firsthand how fast-rendering image grids, search filters, and high-churn ad data can be served smoothly on a lean Rails cluster.

Tiny checklist I keep close

  • Keep secrets in env vars, not in git.
  • Put Active Storage on S3 or similar. Don’t trust local disk.
  • Watch logs after deploy for 10 minutes. You’ll catch the weird stuff.
  • Pin Ruby and Node versions. Saves you from surprise builds.
  • Test a rollback once. Just once. It builds trust.

Final take

You know what? There’s no magic host. There’s only the one that fits your week. When I’m busy, I use Heroku or Render. When I need speed near users, I pick Fly. When I want control and a lower bill, I go Hatchbox + DigitalOcean and keep a short chore list.

If I had to pick one for a fresh Rails 7 app right now, I’d go Render for small teams, Fly for real-time, and Hatchbox for steady apps that need to run for years. That mix kept my apps up, my costs sane, and my phone quiet. And quiet is gold.

P.S. For another boots-on-the-ground perspective, this hands-on walk-through of Rails web hosting that actually worked lines up with a lot of the lessons I’ve learned above and is worth a skim.