On Apr 4, 2005 4:48 AM, Sascha Ebach <se / digitale-wertschoepfung.de> wrote:
> If you ask me I would not do it under 40-50$ per month per account.
> Otherwise I wouldn't know how to turn a enough profit to pay everyone
> involved. Everything else would be a donation based community project
> which is not to be confused with "hosting".

I'd like to note that while I a $50/month hosting fee is quite
affordable for a business, it's far too much for an individual in many
countries to shell out for non-commercial purposes like running the
blog you've just created as your first foray into Rails.

Sure, that $50 is just as easily spent in a bar on a friday night or
on a single computer book, but that doesn't mean that an extra fifty
magically appears into your wallet after you spend one. At least
Amazon.com hasn't sent me a single note back after ordering from them
;)

I myself live in Finland and the cost of living is more or less equal
to other western european/scandinavian countries. I'm currently paying
something around $15 for hosting at pchighway.com (which has Ruby but
not Rails and no FastCGI, I think) and that's more or less exactly
what I'm willing to pay for such a service. It doesn't really matter
what you're offering on top of that $15.

The $12 hosting plans for Rails is something I've thought about
(http://radio.javaranch.com/lasse/2005/03/30/1112214779551.html).
Still, paying TextDrive $12 for 300 megs of disk and 3 gigs of
bandwidth is still pretty far from what you get from "regular" hosting
companies running PHP/Java. If Rails is too heavy on the machines to
achieve the same number of users per box, there's a performance issue
to tackle and higher pricing is not a long-term solution.


-Lasse-