It isn't often that you can pull a near 48 hour day dealing with deploying a new code base into production and come out of it with not only a smile but a blog post praising your hosting company.  I just finished such an endeavor (ordeal??) and it was the typical sort of experience where you need to do constant server tuning, rebooting to get around load issues, issues with crawlers flooding your site and thus fine grained ActiveRecord optimizations, etc.

Now the site in question is hosted at Rails Machine and, to paraphrase, I come not to bury them but to praise them.  During the course of this project, Rails Machine has been:

• Nothing but professional
• They turned me onto their new Moonshine project which makes server tuning magnificently easy (imagine setting your Passenger configuration options from within Ruby code)
• They didn't bat an eye at multiple reboots even late on a Saturday night
• When we had major problems, they replaced our server without being asked; all I had to do was point out that the issue had happened twice and *whammo* new server

And then, to add icing to a delicious cake, I just got this email:

Hi Scott -

I just wanted to check in and see if you were able to get this to work. Please let me know if you need any further help!

--Ahesan

Ahesan, you magnificent bastard!  Thank you for sending this.  I can't tell you how good it made me feel to get this at 3:24 am.

So here's my personal bottom line for hosting Rails apps.  If you need quality, reliable hosting for Rails with outstanding support then you need to run, not walk and sign up with them.  I won't tell you its cheap -- it isn't but Rails Machine knows their stuff and does an outstanding job.  Overall I've been more impressed with Rails Machine than any other Rails hosting company I've worked with.

Note 1: I've been a Rails Machine customer for over 3 years now and they've kept every one of the Rails apps I've been a lead developer on running like a champ but their customer service over this past weekend was well over the top.  Thanks guys.  Appreciated.

Note 2: Since I wrote this up in the bowels of a Sunday night 3 am debugging session, I've since had follow up from others at Rails machine including Josh and Will.  Both took the time to go above and beyond just as Ahesan did.  Thanks guys.  Will in particular cobbled together an excellent suggestion showing how to use MoonShine to do something not explicitly supported yet