brant interactive

Outside of my everyday work, I have a number of side projects, all running on various shared hosting accounts. It no longer seemed to make a ton of sense to pay for all these individual hosting accounts when I could run them all on one machine. None of the apps are so intense, process-wise or space-wise that would merit a dedicated machine, so a VPS just made the most sense. The nature of Rails deployment was the real impetus, though. I had an account with Dreamhost and it was quite possibly the slowest host I’ve ever used. Suport was also pretty bad. So I went ahead and got a VPS at Hostmysite. I’ve had quite a few shared accounts with them over the years, and their support has been the best by far. As a company they just plain ‘get it.’ Sounds cliched, but they do that extra little bit that most hosting companies won’t. And while I’m sure it stretches their support budget, it’s what makes them such a successful hosting company and distinguishes them from other companies.

When it comes to Rails hosting, there are a handful of other hosting companies who position themselves as Rails hosting specialists. Your box will be delivered all nice and pretty, already equipped witht all the various software a typical Rails production environmnet requires. And with the nature of Rails deployment being what it is, that might have avoided all the headaches I encountered setting it up myself, but I’m happy I’m there now and Ruby and Rails are running smoothly. Plus, you learn a lot more by torturing your self with an empty machine. I’m going to write something up later on that, as I’m sure it will help someone. Lots of people getting into Rails are moving to VPSs and some of what I learned would have been really, really great to know ahead of time.

My VPS is running Fedora Core 4, and while equipped with the standard stuff like MySQL and Apache, they was no Ruby or Rails, and no compiler for that matter, or package manager like YUM. One email to support and it was all installed. Do think hard before getting a VPS with Plesk. While it helps initially with quick admin things like mail and domains, it requires a good bit of RAM; certainly more than the 256 the standard setup come with. 256 megs of RAM will barely allow you to run Plesk and a shell session at the same time. I’ve upgraded to 512 megs of RAM and things are good. Aside from the RAM hog Plesk is, it also has its tentacles wrapped around other things that aren’t totally apparent. At least not to someone whose not run a server with Plesk. When admining virtual hosts in Apache, you need to manage them in such a awy that doesn’t’ interfere with the way Plesk deals with them, or you’ll either render Plesk unusable or it will simply overwrite your manual settings.

Also, don’t waste your time with Fast CGI. After days of following every tutorial on the web on getting Rails running with Apache and fast cgi on Fedora (with plesk), I gave up in favor of SCGI, which is running great thus far. It’s far easier to set up and manage as well. I know mongrel is the more popular choice these day, so I’ll probably try that out as well soon. The weird thing about fast cgi is that I was able to set it up on both windows andlinux Ubuntu, so it must be something related to Fedora.

The bottom line is that you should definitely consider moving to a VPS. Aside from the extra work that comes with managing your own server, they’re affordable and will improve your linux admin skills for sure. Mine wore reasonble before getting the vps but much better now. Lotsa tips on running a vps are sure to follow..