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This is the full ToS from TextDrive from when this offer was available:

TextDrive Terms of Service

The following terms and conditions (these “Terms”) govern the provision by TEXTDRIVE, INC. (“Company”) of the services and/or products (referred collectively herein as “Services and Products”) described on the Server Order Form, the Service Level Agreement and Service Exhibit attached hereto (collectively the “Service Descriptions”) and defined in any of the Company’s product support listing, to the customer (“Customer”) identified on the Service Descriptions. The Service Descriptions, these Terms and the attachments and any addenda hereto, executed with respect to the Services and Products, are referred to herein, collectively, as this “Agreement.”

Our Hosting Services
Maximum Hard Disk Space. Customer will be provided with the amount of disk space stated in either their dedicated quote or corresponding plan from http://textdrive.com/plans/. Disk space and usage are monitored by TextDrive, Inc., when possible quotas are soft and responsible overages should not impair Customer’s ability to access said disk space. Customers are responsible for purchasing additional disk space beyond that detailed in their “Plan” or to remove files in order to bring their usage with their Plans’s limit.
Jurisdiction and Jurisdictional Disputes. TextDrive Inc is a California corporation. The parties recognize that TextDrive, Inc is under the legal jurisdiction of the State of California, and US federal law. The parties expressly recognize that, where TextDrive, Inc. is acting solely as Customer’s Host, TextDrive, Inc. is not engaged in, and is not actively soliciting, interstate or international commerce for said Customer. Where TextDrive, Inc. is a named party to any type of dispute or litigation involving any acts by Customer that affect out-of-state persons or entities, Customer agrees that it shall indemnify, hold TextDrive Inc. harmless, defend TextDrive, Inc. and challenge the jurisdiction of out of state authorities over TextDrive, Inc.
Storage, Backups and Internet Link. TextDrive Inc. shall store Customer’s Web Sites and Email messages on TextDrive Inc’s servers. The parties expressly recognize that Internet servers and links are susceptible to crashes and down time. TextDrive, Inc. warrants that it shall maintain a consistent link with the Internet, but TextDrive, Inc. cannot and does not warrant that it shall maintain a continuous and uninterrupted link. However, TextDrive, Inc does pass through the following Service Level Agreement from it’s Managed Hosting Provider (NextLevel Internet, Inc. of San Diego, California) and that is 100% Power Uptime and 100% Network Uptime. TextDrive Inc. does monitor all services on our servers at minimum of 5-minute intervals.
Bandwidth. TextDrive, Inc agrees that it shall maintain a 100Mbps connection to each server, however, TextDrive, Inc. does not warrant any response rate or download time beyond it’s control, as this is depending on Customer’s and End Users ISP connections.
Maintenance. TextDrive Inc. may, at its own discretion, temporarily suspend all service for the purpose of repair, maintenance or improvement of any of its systems. However, TextDrive, Inc. shall provide prior notice where it is reasonably practicable under the circumstances, and shall restore service as soon as is reasonably practicable. Customer shall not be entitled to any setoff, discount, refund or other credit, in case of any service outage which is beyond TextDrive Inc’s control or which is reasonable in duration.
Security. The parties expressly recognize that it is impossible to maintain flawless security, but TextDrive, Inc. shall take reasonable steps to prevent security breaches in server interactions with Customer and security breaches in TextDrive Inc’s server interaction with resource

Back in the day, ZOE was exactly what you're looking for. It's an open source, cross platform turn-key, solution (Simple Server is built-in) that is designed to archive, index and search your email (using the Apache Lucene search engine). Jon Udel has a good article on O'Reilly that includes some screen shots.

ZOE meets all of your requirements, though data import is a bit of a problem. There are several different strategies for data import, so one of them may meet your requirements.

Unfortunately, ZOE is abandonware so it's not for the faint of heart. The original author was on the bleeding edge and tended to make 'interesting' technology choices like Tapestry for the framework, and using his own, home-grown build system and a Creative Commons license that isn't usually used for software. He eventually abandoned Java development for Lua and let the registration for the home page lapse. As a result, it's difficult to recommend this for all but the most determined, high functioning users.

As it turns out yes, check out this mailing list post http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/talk/2005-Dec ember/000435.html

supposedly Matz is a real rarity, a Japanese mormon. Not that surprising, since Japan is all about weird fusions

You should check out strongspace.com. They have a monthly plan thats very affordable and if you go through one of their sister companies textdrive.com theres a special right now where you can buy a lifetime account for one payment. Good deals.

The main problem I see that's keeping mass adoption is ease of installation of rails apps

PHP apps are extremely simple to install.

Nearly all hosting providers support it, and installation is usually comprised of uploading some files to a directory and running an install script.

For RoR apps, much special configuration is needed.

Really, the solution (and this is going to sound weird at first) is to not keep sensitive information on your home computer's hard drive. I personally have a USB stick drive in a firebox.

I hate the idea of WoW doing stuff like this (mainly because I don't play WoW myself, but it's on my computer to keep my siblings placated), but WoW is hardly the only program doing this, and with the security of Windows these days, you really can't afford not to take the precaution.

Electronic bank statements, account numbers, etc, all should go on physically removable media. And if you want to be really careful, use a trusted off-site secure backup service like TextDrive's StrongSpace.

I know this is about PHP but as a long-time web developer, I'm sure a lot of other web devs will be reading this, so here are my observations on RoR.

I've started my first small-scale Ruby on Rails project, having done work in the past in ASP, .NET and PHP. Here are some thoughts.

1) RoR may be highly buzz-worthy but it is certainly NOT a panacea. It has a definite and slightly steep learning curve, especially if you are also new to Ruby and/or OOP and/or MVC (I am sort of but not completely new to all of these). You will still have to do the work of developing your application- you just won't have to do the "stupid" kind of work that much (repeating code in views, bubbling new database fields through umpteen app tiers to the surface of your app, hand-validating everything, building a mechanism to bubble errors or notifications to the surface, etc. etc.)

That said...

2) I can see that if I can get past the little syntactic things that are currently tripping me up, a lot of the RoR technology (and all the assistance its framework provides, once you get to know it... again, that takes time) helps to make web development a breeze.

3) MVC certainly seems like a pattern to seriously consider for anything other than a small web app. Mixing code in the presentation layer is not the way to go if you want easy unit testing, separation of view from code (so your graphic designers can go in and do their thing separately), arbitrary mixing of controller code with different views, etc.

4) Ruby itself is a pretty great language to code in and highly readable. It has a few quirks (doesn't every language?) but if you are aware of them then they won't get in your way. Some of the things I like about it were apparently "borrowed" from Perl (as I never really got that into Perl). If you are not a static-typing purist, I'd say check it out on its own.

5) Installing some Ruby/Rails components that depend on each other is not at ALL as painless as it should be on OS X. For example, I'm currently having issues with RMagick and GraphicsMagick even though I followed a guide I found online, to the letter. I think the darwinports, fink, and rubygems people should get together and work some shit out, as all the different default paths these packaging/deployment tools install their stuff to causes mutual interdependencies to sometimes fail. I've also seen some MySQL issues that will require good troubleshooting to resolve, for some people- some of it is based on incompatibilities with GCC 4.0, or between the password hashes of different MySQL versions, or... Basically, this is all stuff that as a Rails scripter (as opposed to a C++ programmer) you wouldn't want to focus too much time on. If you want to know what I'm talking about just google "rmagick 'os x'" or "mysql rails 'os x'" and read up. That said, if you can get a good host with good Ruby/Rails support, you might not need to worry about such things... Unless you want to develop locally on that shiny Powerbook (grrrr). You better be a good troubleshooter, as Google won't get you out of EVERY bind!

6) The people on the #rubyonrails IRC channel on freenode are generally helpful, but not at all hours of the day. It also helps if you put up small PayPal rewards to get someone to help you over those time-sensitive humps ;)

7) Managers at big corporations (such as my employer) who have been out of direct touch with technology for a while will only tend to recommend the "usual big stuff"- in this case Java/EJB/Oracle, or .NET. I suppose this falls under the "Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM" paradigm, but the si

Try lighty its one of the features it has that apache doesn't... its not the only needed feature by many sites that apache is missing there are about a gazallian more... I don't know why it doesn't have apache market share as so many things about it makes it better from lower memory footprint to being able to handle a slashdotting VERY VERY well.

Its under the revised BSD license so its license is better than Apache's.

And before you say it doesn't have .htaccess support... well read why thats a good thing and it has something better than .htaccess support to replace it

Oh yea most of the biggest torrent trackers are using lighty.

Try lighty its one of the features it has that apache doesn't... its not the only needed feature by many sites that apache is missing there are about a gazallian more... I don't know why it doesn't have apache market share as so many things about it makes it better from lower memory footprint to being able to handle a slashdotting VERY VERY well.

Its under the revised BSD license so its license is better than Apache's.

And before you say it doesn't have .htaccess support... well read why thats a good thing and it has something better than .htaccess support to replace it

Oh yea most of the biggest torrent trackers are using lighty.

Apparently someone who hosts at textdrive.com built something like you describe, put it online, but the servers got swamped.

They're currently looking for a host.

From here:

Katrina sites at TextDrive need some help

Some of our friends here at TextDrive have put up some Katrina sites, and one in particular was done by Josh Benton, who is a reporter with The Dallas Morning News, and is from that area.

Josh's site (katrinacheckin.org) allows people from that area and their loved ones to connect, talk to each other in a forum and to post about missing loved ones. It seems to have been picked up by the media and some people from back home and we all of sudden found it running at 120Mbps and doing about 1000 requests/second, and has been doing that for about the last 9 hours.

The problem is that we ourselves honestly can't sustain that output from a single site with no notice, and being still in the middle of a datacenter move where we maintained two parallel setups.

So if you happen to have about 5-10ish extra (high-end) servers and an extra 100-1000Mbps drop sitting around, and would be able to help out, please let me know at jason at textdrive dot com.

Thank you.

Which doesn't really matter if you're willing to shop around. I've found several inexpensive hosts that support Django, which hasn't even had a stable release yet. I'm sure you can find hosts supporting Rails.

Sure enough, the Rails guys even have an official host. Reasonable prices.

Anyone have a real-world example of Rails scaling to a large project and lots of traffic?

While theres no sites i know off with massive traffic that run rails, theres a few large projects. TextDrive run StrongSpace which is basiclly online storage using SFTP and RoR. Also theres a few from the creators of RoR, BaseCamp, BackPack...

Using lighttpd instead of Apache, a shared hosting account on TextDrive took a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend. Without affecting the other sites on the same server!

Using lighttpd instead of Apache, a shared hosting account on TextDrive took a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend. Without affecting the other sites on the same server!

Another alternative is lighttpd instead of Apache. See here for more. A shared hosting account was able to stand up to a "full-frontal slashdotting" -- and that was generating pages in PHP from a database backend.

Rails will win with the market because it is easy to find cheap hosting for Ruby on Rails. Not as cheap as PHP currently, but very reasonable already. Java lacks in this department.

Apache + FastCGI = cheap hosting

True and true.

There's one host that looks promising: http://www.textdrive.com/ -- It's run by Dean Allen (wrote TextPattern), David Heinemeier Hansson (wrote Rails), Matt Mullenweg (wrote WordPress), among others.

Not astroturfing -- I co-lo elsewhere, and almost wish I was willing to do the virtual host thing again to try it out.

You might try TextDrive

Fantastic tech support, lots of support for opensource projects, a full ruby on rails implementation. These cats kick ass.

Lurk on the forums for a day or so to get a feel for things, it's not a bad place to call ~/

You might try TextDrive

Fantastic tech support, lots of support for opensource projects, a full ruby on rails implementation. These cats kick ass.

Lurk on the forums for a day or so to get a feel for things, it's not a bad place to call ~/

The hosting service Textdrive has support for Rails and I'm sure many more will pop up.