Wednesday
29Mar2006
Ruby on Rails hosting
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 at 10:08AM
This is going to be one of those days. I wake up to hear my phone beeping insistently at me, telling me of `DOWN ESCALATION` reports for all of my Ruby on Rails web sites. Oh, bother. [DreamHost](http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?wossname) appears to be playing silly buggers. It looks a lot like they've partially upgraded to RoR 1.1, but for some reason, not installed all the correct dependencies. And as to why one of my sites that's already tied to 1.1 is dying, I have no idea. It was working fine yesterday!
And to top everything off, I have a hangover. Argh!
So, who do you recommend for Ruby on Rails hosting? I've currently got 3 stable, production applications that I need not to crash. And I've got another 2 in active development. I'm not particularly fussed about any of the other aspects of hosting (email, DNS, subversion, etc) since DH does a good enough job of that for me. I just need a stable host for deploying my applications where performance is good enough, there's the prospect of scaling as necessary, and it's reliable. So, who would you recommend?
**update** Yes, freezing the rails version has solved the problem for most of the sites. Though to play nicely with [capistrano](http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17), I do it by setting `svn:externals` on `vendor/` to `rails http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-1-0` instead of running `rake freeze_gems`. And for the one that was already tied to 1.1, the customer had coincidentally triggered a bug in my code, so that was nothing to do with anything else. Now if only I could get typo to start working again, I'd be sorted.
And to top everything off, I have a hangover. Argh!
So, who do you recommend for Ruby on Rails hosting? I've currently got 3 stable, production applications that I need not to crash. And I've got another 2 in active development. I'm not particularly fussed about any of the other aspects of hosting (email, DNS, subversion, etc) since DH does a good enough job of that for me. I just need a stable host for deploying my applications where performance is good enough, there's the prospect of scaling as necessary, and it's reliable. So, who would you recommend?
**update** Yes, freezing the rails version has solved the problem for most of the sites. Though to play nicely with [capistrano](http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17), I do it by setting `svn:externals` on `vendor/` to `rails http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-1-0` instead of running `rake freeze_gems`. And for the one that was already tied to 1.1, the customer had coincidentally triggered a bug in my code, so that was nothing to do with anything else. Now if only I could get typo to start working again, I'd be sorted.
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Reader Comments (10)
ALWAYS freeze your app when running on a shared server...or...just freeze it always...
Another vote for a VPS like rimuhosting. Shared hosting would scare me far too much for any sort of client-facing site.
Could you walk us newbie dreamhost rails users through freezing it a bit more clearly. Thanks!
Shared hosting is a mixed bag. I'm considering a VPS, but have also gotten a little help with a monitoring tool that at least emails me when things go wrong (like today when Dreamhost upgraded to Rails 1.1 in the middle of the night).
http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/29/surviving-rails-1-1-with-server-monitoring
[...] *Update to this: It appears that Dreamhost has decided to upgrade to Rails 1.1 and is causing outrage on all the rails site hosted as I had predicted. Why.. Why.. Why… Dreamhost….. Posted by gizmoojo Filed in Ruby on Rails, gizmoojo, dreamhost [...]
We had a heck of a time keeping our site up while in development. We tried several of the bigger names in ruby hosting but either they had great support but serious down time or expected you to play sys admin for everything.
We also thought it was silly to shell out for a dedicated box during development so after searching the world over (literally) we found "Avlux":http://avlux.net/. Andrew is great and was able to help us through all the pitfalls of living on the edge with RoR. I can highly recommend Avlux for anything from a small site to helping put your app into production.
Hope that helps!
Sorry I forgot I wasn't in our blog. This should be the right format for links href="http://avlux.net">AVLUX
BlackSun.ca Offers Ruby on Rails web hosting on any of their plans, starting at $10 cdn per month ($7 usd). All of the plans are Feature - Rich... with a lot of free stuff included!
Shared hosting can be a good solution for those not wanting to administer their own linux servers... I can recommend speedyrails.com, performance and support are very good.
Here is another vote for VPS hosting, Ill be do the same thing with my websites soon.