samsouder.com

So yesterday evening/this morning when I was being frustrated by my Rails app seemingly being killed by DreamHost’s watchdog process killer, I stumbled over a company doing VPS hosting called slicehost.

Slicehost’s service is pretty neat in that you can setup a virtualized linux box in minutes. And you get full control over the entire box, they just give you a control panel to access functions like restarting and rebuilding the box. So there are ups and downs… If you don’t want to be a linux admin, they probably aren’t for you. But, if you don’t mind learning some very useful information, you can run your own box for as little as $20/month with no contract!

They add servers as they get customers to fill them, so I have to wait until next week to try it out, but I am excited to dive in and see what kind of performance it has. I am only going to test out the 256MB slice for now. I hear that 256MB is good enough for a couple hardworking Mongrel processes. Plus, I really want to make a server that can do whatever I want with (insert crazy-man laugh here).

Tags: dreamhost, hosting, linux, mongrel, rails, slicehost, virtual, vps by Sam Souder
No Comments »

So here is my first post running the spectacular Typo blog Rails app. Typo seems pretty cool so far. I love the admin interface: simple, elegant, yet flexible.

So how am I running a Rails application on 1and1 hosting? I’m not. My free preview account from 1and1 (which was just fine for PHP) expires on the 31st of January, so I had to switch hosts. I also had a domain registered through them (samandjanali.com), so I had to move that as well. Who did I decide to move to?

DreamHost.

They have some very good pricing and seemingly unending amounts of storage and bandwidth for your hosting plan (they increase every week indefinitely). They said they hosted Rails and let you install new Gems too, so I signed up.!

Yeah, not smart. I should have done more questioning and research.

They are using Apache/FastCGI, which isn’t bad really, but there is something that makes me not like DreamHost right now. They have some kind of watchdog process that seemingly randomly kills my dispatch.fcgi processes! Not to mention that their protocol for restarting a Rails app is kill -9‘ing any ruby dispatch.fcgi process

Support has been very good with DreamHost so far, so we’ll see if they have any solution for the killing my processes thing (resulting in very bad Internal Server Error 500 errors once and awhile). Hopefully they can resolve the issues and everything will be fine and dandy. I am really not in the mood to change hosting again.

Tags: 1and1, apache, dreamhost, fastcgi, hosting, php, rails, ruby, typo by Sam Souder
2 Comments »