Hosting Rails Fun or You Get what You Pay For
Posted by Paul Haddad Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:35:00 GMT
I think I'm on my 4th web provider in 3 years. I started over at Hurricane Electric which is actually a rather decent provider for static content. They are however a bit expensive so I was lured over to DreamHost. Now I know a lot of people dislike DreamHost but for static content its hard to beat them from a feature and price standpoint.
The problem with Dreamhost started when I went to deploy my first rails app. This is something I wouldn't recommend for anyone. Dreamhost just isn't setup to host something like rails, they have very strict monitoring software that kill any long running processes or anything that consumes too much memory. This pretty much kills Rails so it was time for another move.
After looking around for quite a bit I settled on HostingRails.com which seemed to be a good choice, for a while. They had fairly knowledgeable support folks and were able to setup some mongrel instances and a fastcgi instance for me. I'm not really crazy about their cPanel based control panel, but then I'm not really crazy about any of those control panels. However HostingRails.com has started getting really problematic lately. I have offsite monitoring tools running and several times a day my rails site would show as being down, most of the time this was a 10-30 minute problem, however recently I've had at least a couple outings that lasted several hours. Following up with support wasn't really very useful, it'd take several hours to fix anything and sometimes I didn't even get replies. The final straw was when for no reason they decided to firewall outgoing packets to my credit card processor.
After more looking around I switched over to a Virtual Host over at MediaTemple. I debated going with their Grid Service but saw a few bad reports on it and was tired of risking it. The Virtual Host setup seems to be pretty good (specially once I had them remove that Plesk stuff). Their email based support seems glacially slow, but that's about the only complaint I have with them so far. I've got 4 mongrel instances running across 3 different applications (2 typo blogs and the backend store for PTH. Again so far so good, I'm a little concerned that I might be going the memory allocation, but they haven't complained yet. :^)
I'll talk some more about how to properly install rails on one of these Centos 4 like boxes in a future blog entry.
