I had been hosting with Textdrive, now Joyent, since early 2005. They were one of the very first hosts that allowed, in fact encouraged, you to host a Ruby on Rails site when Rails was just a young sap trying to get its roots. For the most part, the Textdrive has fulfilled my needs pretty well over the last couple of years.

Needs change.

First, I really wanted to get on a VPS solution rather than a shared host so that I can have more control over the fine tuning of things. I have used a VPS solution on other projects for some time over at the excellent Rails Machine. In fact, I would recommend Rails Machine to anybody who wants the absolute simplest way to get up and running with a full Rails stack and robust deployment strategy in a very short time. However, after reading some great reviews of Rimuhosting, it sounds like it is a comparable service that gives a little bit more bang for the buck. Of course, I am cheating a little bit. I am using the railsmachine gem to get my projects started with the same efficiency as I was getting at Rails Machine.

Secondly, I wanted to have better control of my e-mail. Since my DNS settings were hosted with Textdrive, I was a little limited on how my mail could be set up. I use Gmail as a POP client and if you have ever done this, you will know that it is not the best solution. Gmail only updates when it wants to (or you can go in and manually tell it to update) rather than on a set schedule of every so many minutes. I also never really liked the “Sent from Gmail” that it leaves in the from address when you send an e-mail (it doesn’t always do this, but I could not figure out how to control it).

So now I am on a shiny new VPS installation and am hosting my mail with the free Google Apps. It’s looking good so far.