What kind of hosted service do I want for my Ruby application? [closed]

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Closed 8 years ago.

I am an intermediate programmer, up to date primarily web pages/applications that were served by Apache and run either on my own boxes or on an inexpensive webhost.

I've created a JRuby application which pulls financial data from the web, performs various calculations on it, then creates webpages using the data. The control-flow is performed by a bash shell script and currently runs every five minutes on my machine. At times, I run the program with a slightly larger data set, and calculations can take up to an hour to complete on my machine (4 year old laptop). I would eventually like to use a much larger data set which I estimate would take my machine over 24 hours to complete. For a few reasons, I've decided to see if I can host this application on the web. The first is to be able program while mobile, the other is for increased performance and the last is cost.

I've been looking at Linode, Digital Ocean, Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, but I'm not sure what kind of service would provide what I need. For the time being, I'm the only one using this data, and the "hiccup" I'm experiencing is due to the processor intensive calculations, not bandwidth or memory limitations (lets assume the code is written as efficiently as possible). If I get a 1-core 512mb/1gb VPS from Linode or DO, will I see an improvement? Is what I'm looking for a different kind of service than the ones I name above?

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

This question is somewhat subjective, but I think AWS or some other cloud solution would be your best bet, that way you can spin up an instance when you need to do some number crunching, and when its done, turn it off. This would give you the ability to spin up a pretty beefy server when you need it, but when you don't, its not costing you anything. This could end up being significantly cheaper than going with the monthly subscription VPS model. AWS and Rackspace both have cloud offerings that would be great for this type of usage.