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.
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 VPS sites but I have a few low volume
mainly
personal/hobby sites that are still running on a modest server in my
basement. I really like the aspect of running at a professionally
managed
colo on someone else’s hardware. I would like to migrate these to a low
cost
service. These are not business sites and don’t have strict up time
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.
My main apps are now running on VPS sites but I have a few low volume
mainly personal/hobby sites that are still running on a modest server in my
basement. I really like the aspect of running at a professionally managed
colo on someone else’s hardware. I would like to migrate these to a low cost
service. These are not business sites and don’t have strict up time
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 use a single virtual private server for all of my hobby sites. Each
site is just another virtual host in the Apache config. It works well
enough for what it is and it’s pretty cheap when you spread it across
several sites.
involve sharing
If you are happy with your shared hosting experience – meaning that your
service is probably what I need. But I would like to know what to expect.
I have VPS space available. I’m basically wanting to host a few people
on my machine and cover the costs of my colocation fee.
On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 09:52 -0800, Kelly F. wrote:
These are not business sites and don’t have strict up time
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’ve heard rumors of companies that have horrible downtime issues. We’ve
been very fortunate to have very little downtime and because Rails is
still fairly new in the hosting world (and we’ve been doing it for a
year+ now)… we are feeling fairly confident in our setup.
The biggest problem that we have seen is trying to fit Rails into an
existing platform that is designed for PHP hosting.
We’re Rails guys… and we focus on Rails hosting as a priority… (and
PostgreSQL). I believe that our customers can feel and see the
difference. Shared Rails hosting is not trivial and it takes a lot of
trial and error to get it close to right. We’re getting closer to right and will be making an announcement very soon about our latest
approach to solving this problem.
