Rails hosting services always boast things such as “excellent customer service”, “24/7 technical support” and “world-class customer service”. This is often at the very heart of their marketing campaign. It fills up their emails, tweets, Facebook posts, and covers their websites. If you’ve been coding with Ruby on Rails for any length of time you will testify that not many hosting companies actually live up to their promises. Often, right when you need their help the most, hosting companies will leave you waiting for hours to receive a response.

So, we sent a few of the hosting companies (11 to be exact) an email with a question. All of the emails were sent around 3PM Central US Time on a Tuesday. The question was fairly simple: “Will you be supporting Ruby on Rails 3.1?” Below are the results of how long it took them to get back to us and the answer that we received. They are sorted by response time. Shortest time is at the top.