Mediatemple offer this buzzwordy “gridserver” hosting for 20$/month, and Dreamhost offer a great regular hosting service for 7$/month and up. I have an account at Dreamhost, and I am keeping it, it’s great, and they have a great control panel and good support. Cheap!
However, I moved poorbuthappy.com (my travel project) to Mediatemple a few days ago, and the difference in speed is incredible. Pingdom has some really nice tools to measure speed. Before the move (on Dreamhost), pages would load in 2 seconds (2000 milliseconds), 4 seconds and more. Sometimes up to 10 seconds.
After the move, the core html of the page loads consistently in about 400 to 600 ms. That’s professionally fast. That’s about how fast Flickr loads. That’s almost as fast as Google’s pages (they tend to be around the 300ms). I am very impressed.
Below are some screenshots from pingdom.
Peter Van Dijck 
Peter,
Last weekend, I moved my web site from home on an ADSL line to Media Temple. Offers like those from Dreamhost initially piqued my interest, but a web developer friend steered me toward Media Temple, stating that Dreamhost et al. vastly oversold their servers and bandwidth. Plus, Media Temple offered ssh/rsync for updating content, which was how I was updating my site. So far, so good!
Cheers,
Andreas
Hi Peter,
you might want to check out this comment found on: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/90357
mediatemple vs. nginx
Posted by andrewfromfly (Guest) on 04.12.2006 20:58
Hello, thought I’d share my experience with rails on the
mediatemple.com grid server. They offer a 64 MB mongrel container 1 TB
of bandwith and 1,000 grid processing units for $20 a month. In theory
I love it because they already have done all the load balancing work
for you. The DB is on another machine, you have access too 100s of
machines on “the grid” and just pay extra for going over 1,000 grid
processing units… but… in practice they are still working out
issues. They had a huge crash about a week ago, but even without that
crash my ruby sites were often slow. You can just tell I wasn’t
getting enough CPU cycles… not enough machines on the grid? In any
event I finally made the call that a P4 1 GIG RAM dedicated server from
godaddy for $107 a month was the better deal.
And in setting up the server I discovered nginx. Nginx is great! A
replacement for apache or lighttpd it communicates with X number of
mongrel containers (5 is a good number to run) and is super fast. So,
it’s $20+ a month vs $107 a month but totally worth it. Nginx is so
fast you can run lots of sites from the same box.
Cheers,
Thomas