I moved a rails application to textdrive using their low-cost shared
plan.
Once on textdrive my app would display ‘proxy errors’ periodically.
Hitting
reload
seemed to be all that was needed to get past the proxy error.
After discussions with their support people I decided the proxy errors
were
being caused by apache server restarts – because there were many of us
sharing
one apache server there were relatively constant restarts. I slapped my
head
and immediately started looking for another solution that didn’t involve
sharing
an apache instance with tens or hundreds of other users. I want to
emphasize
that my experience with textdrive was not all bad – I blame myself for
not
thinking
through how shared hosting would impact my application.
Now I’m trying to decide if shared hosting is simply evil, or did I just
have a bad experience. So help me by answering some of these questions?
Are proxy errors common on all shared accounts, regardless of the
hosting service?
If you are happy with your shared hosting experience – meaning
that
your application runs reliably – which hosting service are you
using?
My main goal is to figure out if my experience is typical or not. And if
there are shared services out there that work fine, which ones are they?
My main apps are now running on at VPS sites. I really like the aspect
of
running at a professionally managed colo on someone elses hardware. I
have
other web sites (mostly php and some perl cgi) that are still running on
my
basement server that I would like to migrate to a low cost service.
These
are not business sites and don’t have strict uptime requirements, and I
don’t want to spend much money, so a shared hosting service is probably
what
I need. But I would like to know what to expect. I hope the php/perl cgi
doesn’t derail (no pun intended) the conversation.
I have not been using them for long, but so far I have had very good
luck with Site5 hosting; they support rails via apache w/ FCGI, Perl,
and PHP 4 and 5. I haven’t noticed any downtime due to apache
restarts, but I’ve only been with them a few weeks.
Now I’m trying to decide if shared hosting is simply evil, or did I just
have a bad experience. So help me by answering some of these questions?
Well I can also say that my shared hosting experience with Textdrive was
not a good one. I even went for their Lighttpd option and it still was
not much faster. Seemed like everytime I wanted to do something their
server was down - not sure if this is a common thing with shared hosts,
or just Textdrive. So I simply wrote off shared hosting and ended up at Linode.com (not affiliated with them). Setup my own Debian 3.1 system,
Lighttpd, and Postgres system in a couple hours and I was good to go.
Haven’t looked back since. For $19 a month I cannot say I haven’t been
impressed with the VPS route.
Haven’t looked back since. For $19 a month I cannot say I haven’t been
impressed with the VPS route.
Wow. Very similar experiences. Yes I really like the VPS systems. I’m
using Rimu http://rimuhosting.com/and Quantact http://www.quantact.com/. I’m
very
happy with this solution. But I wonder about all the other
textdrive/site5/dreamhost etc experiences.
So I simply wrote off shared hosting and ended up at Linode.com (not affiliated with them).
I am likewise quite happy with Linode after, hmm, about a year? And
likewise not affiliated with Linode in any fashion. I run my rails
setup alongside apache2/perl and mysql on the 160MB plan or whatever.
The downside is you have to learn more about system administration
than you’d probably like to. I use Ubuntu, which has apt, but still
have to setup a lot of things by hand. And Ubuntu is missing a lot of
dev tools (like a c library!). Then you have to make sure your setup
fits inside your RAM efficiently or you’ll start swapping a lot.
On the other hand my significant other has had lots of trouble with
Dreamhost, including random shutdowns of essential services, like
shutting down and archiving her database without her permission (it
was actively backing a website!), and moving/disabling key cgi scripts
(for Movable Type). They would basically do something drastic and
awful without notifying her, then restore the service when she called
to complain and make it sound like some kind of routine housekeeping.
When was this? My impression is that Textdrive seems to have certain
servers
that have issues until they find the root cause and train or relocated
the
troublesome hosted app. However, I also get the impression that uptime
and
reliability have improved significantly starting sometime in December. T
I’m considering moving an app back to Textdrive, but am still
researching
reliability. What timeframe did your issues occur in?
Also, they now have the intermediate “business hosting” which is shared,
but
with less people sharing one machine. However, enquiries regarding
experiences about that haven’t brought a response yet on the list yet,
as
far as I know.
I have been running a couple of rails apps on txd since 2004…there was
a period with some downtime, but since they moved to their own
datacenter I havent experienced any problems
I was on textdrive from the middle of December to the 3rd of January –
not
much time I know, but my app can’t have a reputation of being
unreliable. I
was on harwood.
Railsplayground.com has excellent service. I’ve been with them for
over a month now and not had any problems. They also have excellent
customer service which helped through the signing up and when I
recently upgraded my account there.
I’ve been very happy with PlanetArgon (planetargon.com). Robby made a
post in this or one of its related threads about their being
Rails-centric. Everything you’re grappling with in your Rails
development, they are too.
I happened on them by accident because I needed a host who supported PHP
5. Now all my sites are on them.
Kelly F. wrote:
I moved a rails application to textdrive using their low-cost shared
plan.
Once on textdrive my app would display ‘proxy errors’ periodically.
Hitting
reload
seemed to be all that was needed to get past the proxy error.
After discussions with their support people I decided the proxy errors
were
being caused by apache server restarts – because there were many of us
sharing
one apache server there were relatively constant restarts. I slapped my
head
and immediately started looking for another solution that didn’t involve
sharing
an apache instance with tens or hundreds of other users. I want to
emphasize
that my experience with textdrive was not all bad – I blame myself for
not
thinking
through how shared hosting would impact my application.
Now I’m trying to decide if shared hosting is simply evil, or did I just
have a bad experience. So help me by answering some of these questions?
Are proxy errors common on all shared accounts, regardless of the
hosting service?
If you are happy with your shared hosting experience – meaning
that
your application runs reliably – which hosting service are you
using?
My main goal is to figure out if my experience is typical or not. And if
there are shared services out there that work fine, which ones are they?
My main apps are now running on at VPS sites. I really like the aspect
of
running at a professionally managed colo on someone elses hardware. I
have
other web sites (mostly php and some perl cgi) that are still running on
my
basement server that I would like to migrate to a low cost service.
These
are not business sites and don’t have strict uptime requirements, and I
don’t want to spend much money, so a shared hosting service is probably
what
I need. But I would like to know what to expect. I hope the php/perl cgi
doesn’t derail (no pun intended) the conversation.
My main goal is to figure out if my experience is typical or not. And if
there are shared services out there that work fine, which ones are they?
I’ve got a small app deployed on Dreamhost that has been working fine
with a little bit of hackery to get round Dreamhost’s process cleanup. I
updated the Dreamhost wiki with everything I had to do.
I’m probably going to be deploying a larger app on Dreamhost in the not
too distant future, so I’ll report back how that goes.
Il giorno 14/feb/06, alle ore 18:46, Kelly F. ha scritto:
ones are they?
I am using a shared hosting service for the only public Rails
application I have http://evilornot.info and must say that I’m
quite happy with the level of service that I get from Planet Argon
(BTW, did you recently upgrade your servers, Robby? I’m seeing better
performance recently).
Granted, this is a very low traffic website (less than 1000 page
views a day) and I don’t care much about continuous availability,
even though I had no problems so far. But for a moderate traffic site
I wouldn’t think twice about moving to a VPS or even a dedicated
server, not so much because of performance considerations, but mostly
because on a dedicated server I can tweak and tune the configuration
as much as I like.
Hi Matt, I have to say that the admin panels on Site5.com are extremely
painless to use… they allow the client to set up email addresses, FTP
accounts + quotas, etc.
I’ve got a VPS running on Rimu http://www.rimuhosting.com, and I’ve
been
super happy with it. If you just follow Ezra’s directions at http://www.brainspl.at/rails-stack.html, you can get the box up and
running
pretty easily. That’s only the beginning, of course, and I’ve had to do
a
lot of learning since I’m from a Windows background.
My biggest problem is that I have clients that I need to set up on a
system
that has control panels so that the client can create their own email
addresses and use webmail painlessly. I’ve got Squirrelmail running on
my
VPS, but sending my clients to Webmin to manage email addresses seems a
bit
extreme. The shared host solution allows me to escape all of that pain
and
just send them to a control panel. Even TextDrive sketches me out with
handing a site off to a client and having them manage it, since
TextPanel is
still not available and management is handled through Webmin.
Do any of the afore-mentioned hosting providers have decent control
panels,
etc, so that I can build a site and not be actively involved in
maintaining
the non site related stuff, such as email? Or does anyone have any
recommendations on open-course control panels that aren’t so hard for a
non-techie to use?
Thanks!
Matt
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