I’ve recently signed up to Viaduct, a hosting service by the guys at aTech Media. I was very intrigued after using their last hosting service, Appli, and was upset when it was shut down.

Viaduct is like Heroku’s better looking sister that no-one can keep their eyes off. But why? Here’s a few reasons:

• It supports multiple languages such as Ruby, Node.js, Python and PHP with more coming soon.
• Supports a number of different databases like MySQL, Postgres, Redis and more.
• Easily setup “shared directories” allowing files to stored on Viaduct. They don’t need to be stored on a cloud storage provider such as S3.
• Setup web processes or workers with a few clicks. It also automatically detects if you have DelayedJob or Resque setup which is very neat!
• Deploy from Git repositories as well as Mercurial with zip & FTP coming soon.
• They also have an SMTP service meaning you don’t have to pay extra for a service like Postmark.
• Small applications are completely free! You get 1 worker process, 1 small/hobby database, 1GB storage and 3 shared directories for free.
• A simple & beautiful web interface for managing your apps.
• Useful graphs for showing number of requests, the speed of your app and the amount of bandwidth.
• Easily put your app into “Maintenance Mode”
• Add custom Environment Variables with a few clicks
• Simply add Scheduled Tasks
• …

There are loads of features that Viaduct does better, or that Heroku doesn’t have, to list here. Those are just some of them!

Seriously, you should try it out now!