Ezra turned me onto rimu and it’s night and day compared to TextDrive.
There is no way that a shared hosting environment can compare to a
Xen-based partitioning scheme. Xen will rule the world one day.
My TextDrive server goes down…often. I cannot recommend the service
for anyone wanting to do production systems or even a production blog
for that matter. It borders on being infuriating. Of course, that is
probably also true of other shared hosting environments that cater to
developers as well.
In my opinion, what TextDrive should do is have a second tier of
servers that they reserve for apps that behave properly for some
period of time. Then your uptime would improve as you get promoted.
Not nearly as good as having a VPS that just plain works period, but
it would be a hack that could make a few of their unhappy customers a
litle bit happier (I have to assume I’m not the only one).
Now I have to see if I can get a refund on my TextDrive lifetime
membership plan…
I’m using a shared account from grokthis.nethttp://grokthis.net
Their services seemed quite odd at first, but one month later I am happy
with them.
You get to choose the webserver you want, and you are basically in
control.
It seems like one of the major hurdles for Rails right now is finding
a reliable production environment – especially if you don’t want to
fork out for a VPS or dedi box, and then figure out how to set it all
up yourself.
I run a small mom and pop’s hosting company and we’re looking to add
RoR to our services. So I’ve been snooping around, trying to find
the best way to do this in a shared hosting environment. But the
more I read, the more I think that Rails is really just not well-
suited to a shared box.
So we’re now leaning toward the idea of offering mini-VPS accounts
pre-configured with Rails + Apache/Lighttpd + FCGI/SCGI. The theory
is that a lot of folks just want a Rails environment that works
reliably straight out of the box. But of course these packages would
need to be priced a little higher than a basic shared hosting account.
So my question to all of you nice people in Rails-land is basically:
Would you pay a little more for a VPS that comes pre-configured for
Rails and includes support for Rails-related issues?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
So my question to all of you nice people in Rails-land is basically:
Would you pay a little more for a VPS that comes pre-configured for
Rails and includes support for Rails-related issues?
Depending on how much more it would be, yes, I’d be ready to fork the
cash over. I’m on DreamHost right now. It works, that’s for sure.
I’d say I have an uptime of over 95%. We had a problem on a server,
and DreamHost staff moved our hosting to another server which was less
loaded.
We have had a lot less problems since then.
My only issue is with zombie FastCGI processes. I’ve been using cron
jobs to kill and restart my FCGI processes, and it seems to work fine
since then. Of course, I’d prefer not to have to do that, but you
know…
Thanks for posting about A Small Orange. I spent some time reading their
site and forums. Seems like they are worth a try. If I signup I’ll use
your
referal.
So my question to all of you nice people in Rails-land is basically:
Would you pay a little more for a VPS that comes pre-configured for
Rails and includes support for Rails-related issues?
Yes. That’s the whole point of using Rails as a web development
environment!
How much?
Still a little early in the exploratory stages so I’m not sure about
pricing yet. I’m imagining it would be somewhere around $29/mo or so.
But if you guys have suggestions about price points and specs, I’d
love to hear them.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Sean
I have been setting up custom VPS servers at rimuhosting.com with
raisl/lighttpd/whatever else configs for about 5 people in the last
month here and those folks have had great luck going that route. I
was also considering whether it would be worth it to get a reseller
account and make a few different custom rails vps images for people
to get preconfigured. Sounds like a great idea for someone with a
smaller hosting company to do. I highly recommend VPS servers using
the xen tech for virtualization though. It performs much better than
the VMware or Virtuozzo VPS servers. Also the way xen is built into a
custom linux kernel it is faster and it doesn’t allow the host to
oversell a physical box. A lot of places that sell cheaper smaller
VPS servers try to cram 50-100 vps’s on one box and you can tell when
you use them.
If anyone else is interested in getting set up with a custom rails
Thanks Ezra for sharing your experiences. We would definitely be
using Xen for virtualization. Any thoughts about what folks would
want in terms of disk space, bandwidth, etc?
Sean
Well for a $29/month plan I think around 30-40gig transfer/month and
maybe 3 or 4 gig disk space with 128-192MB RAM. Something like that
would be a great rails vps and I’m sure you would get customers for
that. If you like I could probably get you a great debian sarge xen
vps image all set up with the whole rails./lighttpd stack. Get in
touch with me off list if you want to talk further about some more
details
Good Luck!
-Ezra Z.
WebMaster
Yakima Herald-Republic Newspaper [email protected]
509-577-7732
Thanks Ezra for sharing your experiences. We would definitely be
using Xen for virtualization. Any thoughts about what folks would
want in terms of disk space, bandwidth, etc?
