Subscribe to RSSPlanet Argon Review
A few months ago I opened an account with shared account with Planet Argon. They offer shared hosting and typo blog hosting. Their typo hosting starts at $3.00 per month and shared hosting at $11.25 per month. There is no setup fee but they require signing up for either six months or annually.
Planet Argon offers excellent support for anyone looking for a Ruby on Rails host. You can deploy your Ruby on Rails application with any combination of the following tools:
- Lighttpd
- Mongrel
- Pound
- Capistrano
Most of the other hosts I checked that use Ruby on Rails uses Apache and fcgi. This combination in a shared environment may work for development but probably won’t perform well enough for a production environment. One of the reasons most other hosts seem to use Apache and fcgi is they also use cPanel. Planet Argon uses VHCS as their control panel. VHCS has a very clean interface and was easy to use.
By default each Ruby on Rails account is configured to use Apache. They also give each customer a custom port to use with Lighttpd. You can send in a support request and they will configure their proxy server to point to your custom port. This will allow people to connect to your Lighttpd site on port 80.
Planet Argon and its customers maintain a documentation site where you can find answers to most of your questions. They also have several active blogs with information concerning their company and any changes that may take place on the servers.
Server performance was very fast and generally stable. Planet Argon is located in Portland and I’m in Seattle so that probably helped my sites feel faster then some other hosts I’ve tested. Over the last 30 days my site experienced approximately 3 hours of downtime. At least one of those hours was during scheduled maintenance. However I never received a notification email that they would be performing any maintenance.
Overall I was very satisfied with Planet Argon and would recommend using them for a shared account. If you are looking for a shared account with Ruby on Rails support they should be near the top of your list.