As many of you know, Media Temple recently launched their Grid Server (gs) hosting line. The Grid Server product is meant to be able to scale with the needs of any web application it hosts. Some of the features of the plan include:

• 100 GBs of premium storage
• 1 TB of short-path bandwidth
• Host up to 100 individual sites
• 1000 email accounts
• 64 MB Ruby/Mongrel container

It’s the last bullet, 64MB Ruby container, that I want to talk a little about. From MT’s website:

Media Temple’s production Container technology provides your Ruby on Rails applications with isolated memory resources (64MB, 256MB and, 1GB) to rapidly deliver smooth, stable hosting performance. Our RoR containers come preloaded with MTR (our custom shell toolkit) simplifies Mongrel setup eliminating the need for legacy solutions such as FastCGI and SCGI.

I spent the last couple of days trying out the ruby container at Media Temple and it is fast fast fast. It’s a little confusing to get things setup because Media Temple has proprietary home grown tools for setting up your rails environment, but thankfully they have a pretty good tutorial, which covers the basics.

If you plan to build and deploy a rails app, I would highly recommend the MT ruby container for your hosting solution. It’s scalable, lightning fast and it won’t break your pocket book.