It's a little confusing with their branding, but this money isn't really for a Ruby "hosting" company, but for their other software offerings and development (Merb, Rubinus, Vertebrae).
Monthly cost per slice $399.00
Setup cost per slice $299.00
Prices are for a single application deployed on a slice. Each additional application installed on your slice is an additional $50 per month per slice with a $100 setup fee
It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the web generally speaking.
Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails and it's infrastructure that costs a lot of money.
Examples:
Remote Backups every 24 hours. That means a server in a different data center, the bandwidth, and the work involved in setting up and managing the backups.
Remote website monitoring. That means a server in a different data center hitting the site to make sure nothing is down. Money and time to deal with that.
Database replication. A large PITA is taken care of on your choice of MySQL 4/5 or PostgreSQL 8.2.
If you add that together, the price doesn't seem as steep. Database replication means two boxes. The offsite backup adds another box and you could always stick the offsite monitoring on that same box. So, now you're at three boxes and I don't think it's crazy to be spending $300 on three boxes. Of course, with EngineYard, you don't have to do any of the setup work and you have the ability to scale more easily. In that setup, there is no load balancer so as you need more capacity, you then have to deal with a load balancer as well as another application server.
The price is a bit of a premium, but not as much as you might think. Mostly, it's just more than what most developers are used to. I'm used to setting myself up on a slicehost slice. I don't have database replication, offsite monitoring, offsite backups, or hardware redundancy. If that box kicks, my site goes down until they can get it running on another box. It hasn't happened to me and I've been a customer for over a year, but it is a possibility. EngineYard is about eliminating those possibilities. That's expensive, but if you're trying to deploy a site that is your business and not your hobby, you should probably look at EngineYard.
EngineYard is about being able to tell potential investors that they don't have to worry about architecture - and have the goods to back it up. I'm a decent sysadmin, but not like people for whom it's there job. I can get Apache, mod_rails, mongrel, nginx, etc. up and running, but sometimes you just want to know that things are set up solidly from people who have a lot more experience than you do.
What EY does can't compare to your average VPS hosting and is absolutely not even close to shared hosting.
If you poke around their site (looking at more than the price), you'll find a lot of information about the depth of their offering. They have a couple great graphics that really fill in some of the blanks.
But, more than all of the great tech, you have a team of people that are passionate about what they do, which is to keep your app up and running while you're on the beach.
Alright so maybe you're not on the beach but the point is that if you have a complex, mission-critical app, you can outsource your hosting and support to them. If you compare how much EY charges to what you'd pay for your own employees to do the same, not to mention the hardware, you'll find the cost of EY is pretty darn cheap.
$.02 from a longtime EY watcher and future customer.
We're with EngineYard. I consider them to be cheap, for what they offer. I've never had a better host, ever. They are extremely responsive, 24x7. All communications are with expert geeks (no dumb first-line support). They know their stuff inside out.
EngineYard are cheap if you compare it to the other available options of that calibre:
1) Do it all yourself.. to set up a similar set-up, with the performance, scalability and redundancy of their infrastructure, would cost much, much more both in hardware and in time.
2) Other comparable offerings from non-rails specialists like Rackspace actually added up to a whopping £6k/m - that was for the smallest possible solution for Rackspace.
So yeah, EY are cheap. You don't use them for hosting your blog, you use them for hosting rails apps like kongregate or scribd - in that context, a few hundred bucks a month is peanuts.
If I get the idea correctly, Amazon isn't investing in EY; Amazon is investing in development of general Ruby technology that benefits everyone in the Ruby/Rails communities, including Amazon and EY.
Actually, we're not really an EC2 competitor. In fact, in the future we're just as likely to be an EC2 consumer.
What we provide, today, is a premium service that can take a small amount of Ruby expertise and make it much more effective.
What we will provide, tomorrow, is the above, plus an infrastructure for distributing your applications into the cloud(s) of your choice. That's Vertebra (disclosure: I designed Vertebra, so I may be biased).
Amazon has everything to gain from our efforts. We aim to make Ruby, Vertebra, and our customers into first-class citizens in the world of EC2 and beyond.
