What are your best experiences with web hosts for Radiant? Are there
any hosts that are particularly Radiant-friendly? Where do you host
your Radiant sites now? Are you happy with them?
I’ll start…
I’ve been hosting several Radiant sites on Dreamhost, but I’ve been
only marginally happy with the service. It tends to be pretty slow at
times.
I’ve had the best luck with my own server, which is a colocated Apple
Xserve. I have full control over it, but it is a pain to manage, and I
don’t like being stuck with the full liability of hosting customers’
sites and email and all that goes with it. On the other hand, Xserve
is an awesome environment for Rails/Radiant. And I’m really looking
forward to trying Leopard server - it really seems ideal for this sort
of thing.
Welcome to Radiant on Dreamhost! To sum it up, Dreamhost’s support for
Rails in general SUCKS. They run on a dynamic-count fcgi setup and they
will not do anything to help you. After 2 months of back and forth with
their support, they will not do ANYTHING to their default box setup.
‘It’s set up for a reason’ attitude. Problem with Dreamhost is by
default they put a cap on you for 200MB RAM usage, and as soon as you
get --5-- processes running of Radiant or any slightly-heavier Rails
script up, you will git that point and their process killer will
ruthlessly start killing your processes; As well, I found if I got too
fast of traffic with them, my CPU would spike HARD (From the dynamic
fcgi launching) and it too then would kill the processes. For many
sites, a fixed 2-process fcgi setup would do well, it cuts down on
memory usage overall and you get some serious speed increases because
you’re not relaunching a process over and over (As soon as one of the 5
processes die down, it kills them too, with how DreamHost is set up) - I
couldn’t handle 500-600 visitors with DreamHost at all. Impossible. My
site would be down for 40-50 minutes out of every hour, just because of
apache taking a moment to respawn a ruthlessly-killed fcgi thread(s). I
couldn’t imagine trying to manage them with the 1500-2200 visitors I get
daily now.
Myself? I chose to host my own system. Rather than a dedicated box, I
went for a VPS, which has been actually very rewarding, but let me tell
you, getting a Mongrel cluster set up and optimized is a headache you
may NOT want to partake in.
If you don’t want to manage your own hosting (As your email seems to
point out) there are solutions, depending on the $ you’re looking to
spend. There are plenty of services, but the one that pops into my head
is http://www.hostingrails.com/ - They offer cheaper fcgi (Which I
likely wouldn’t touch again due to the dynamic allocation issues I had
on DreamHost), or starting at $9.79, you can go Mongrel or $13.98 and up
for Mongrel Cluster.
Just because it says ‘Rails’ on their features page, does NOT mean they
have any clue how to run a Rails service. It’s like saying ‘Free diamond
ring with any purchase!’ and then giving you a plastic ring with a
diamond chip taped to it.
If you don’t want to fiddle with Mongrel or FCGI on your VPS, I highly
recommend Litespeed Web Server. The free version runs quite nicely and
their LSAPI is significantly faster than FCGI. The big bonus is being
able to configure your Rails apps from a web interface. When we
launched kckcc.edu in January, we used Litespeed (purchased 2-cpu
version) and were quite happy with it.
If you don’t want to manage your own hosting (As your email seems to
point out) there are solutions, depending on the $ you’re looking to
spend. There are plenty of services, but the one that pops into my
head
is http://www.hostingrails.com/ - They offer cheaper fcgi (Which I
likely wouldn’t touch again due to the dynamic allocation issues I had
on DreamHost), or starting at $9.79, you can go Mongrel or $13.98
and up
for Mongrel Cluster.
I agree with a big thumbs up for LiteSpeed. We run LiteSpeed on our
production and dev environments primarily for it’s ease of use with
Rails. On top of that, it’s fast to boot and always “just works”.
I also use LightSpeed on my own VPS (Slicehost) and have three radiant
sites running on it for most of a year. It’s only been a positive
experience and it has yet to crash on me. Performance seems just fine
though my sites have never been hammered.
Out of curiosity, did you license the 64bit enterprise version or did
you chroot the 32bit free version? I’m on SliceHost as well, and
have been considering LiteSpeed, but didn’t want to futz with the
chroot path. I’m not really live with any of my sites yet, so Apache
+mongrel is more than adequate. I’m actually planning on going live
with a couple of sites the way that it is, but look toward LiteSpeed
Enterprise when the Mongrel clusters start maxing out my memory.
I agree with a big thumbs up for LiteSpeed. We run LiteSpeed on our
production and dev environments primarily for it’s ease of use with
Rails. On top of that, it’s fast to boot and always “just works”.
My site is running with them - t-engine.onghu.com but it’s very low
volume right now and runs on fcgi. I have plans to move it to Mongrel
but haven’t got to it cos my site’s not fully deployed yet and hasn’t
started hitting much load at all. It seems to work fine.
On the other hand, they seem to be quite good and friendly and most
queries get answered reasonably quickly.
Out of curiosity, did you license the 64bit enterprise version or did
you chroot the 32bit free version? I’m on SliceHost as well, and
have been considering LiteSpeed, but didn’t want to futz with the
chroot path. I’m not really live with any of my sites yet, so Apache
+mongrel is more than adequate. I’m actually planning on going live
with a couple of sites the way that it is, but look toward LiteSpeed
Enterprise when the Mongrel clusters start maxing out my memory.
I stuck with the 32bit version and installed some library that allowed
to to play nicely with the 64bit slice. It did hose me initially as I
didn’t think about the 64bit/32bit executable issue so I was stuck for
a day while I tried to determine the problem (it was my first try
install LiteSpeed). I can look it up in my notes if you want to know
exactly what I did.
I had posted my install notes on Slicehost’s wiki a while back and
it’s still there. ia32-libs was the package I installed. I am
running Ubuntu so if you’re not on Ubuntu then you may need to hunt
around for the appropriate package for your distro.
Cheers,
Marty
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