Hosting Advice

Hey all,

Hopefully this isn’t too off topic, I’m hoping to get some support and advice about using Brightbox as the backbone of a new web design/development studio I am setting up…

Having just been made redundant after a 5 year run at a PHP design and development company I have made the decision to setup as a freelance provider, and make the switch from PHP to “live the dream” by working with Rails.

Obviously one of the key points I need to work out is the hosting. The clients I will be aiming for will expect an “all in one” solution from me, if I am building them a site with Rails I will almost certainly need to organise the hosting, and I am all too aware that a shoddy shared host just isn’t going to cut it when it comes to Rails.

It seems that Brightbox is offering a good service in the UK, and seems to provide a quick setup which will save me messing around with slices and the like.

I’m hoping to use some of Brightbox’ features as part of my “sell” the MySQL cluster is presumably much more powerful than a DB running on the same box. It seems without taking the managed back-ups I am going to have to roll my own, transferring DB dumps and uploads to S3 seems a good way to go. I’m not sure how many clients are going to care about this, but in my rather short career I’ve not heard of many freelancers who take the integrity of the sites they deploy very seriously – please correct me if I am wrong, of course!

Unless using an internal server I am assuming the clients will also need me to provide email. I’ve been considering Google Apps Standard Edition to fill this gap – has anyone got any experience with this, any alternatives?

Is anyone here doing anything similar? Is this a route worth taking or do I need to rethink?

Any advice or comments would be much appreciated, thanks in advance,

Andy