Ruby on Rails Shared Hosting
I have been learning Rails over the course of the last year or two and have developed a number of small sites using the framework. Most of these sites are not highly profitable and so getting a VPS server did not make sense for me. Instead I stuck with my existhing Shared Host, A Small Orange.
[
A Small Orange
](http://www.asmallorange.com/)
They had been a good server for my PHP sites. The service was pretty good and there wasn’t too much downtime, the speeds were good and the prices reasonable. I found their system very well-integrated and the Cpanel was very convenient. So I thought I would give them a chance with Rails. Things started out alright when I first put up one Rails site that was frozen to 1.2.3. Getting a Rails site online was not the easiest thing – certainly not a 1-click process but it was do-able without too much hassle using their Wiki as a guide.
Problems arose when I decided that I loved Rails so much that it was time to re-code my biggest, most complex and most visted site in Rails 2.0. Their FCGI method of running Rails was not working for me and I got suspended on a number of occasions.
It was hard for me to pin the problem down exactly - what I ultimately concluded was that code warnings pertaining to future Rails versions (specifically a warning that there should be no space before parentheses) was causing the FCGI processes to crash and re-generate and start piling up. There were instances where I had 11 and on another occasion 30 instances of Ruby running via FCGI due to this insignificant little problem.
I thought had the problem solved simply by removing all of these errors and everything ran very smoothly for perhaps a month. But of course who could guess when another errant space might pop up or some other warnings might come out guns a-blazing for my site.
Recently I synchronized my site and did some bug fixes and upgrades etc and that little warning reared its very ugly head again and I was suspended again - the support guys were able to offer absolutely no help regarding the problem and I was faced with two options.
- Figure out how to turn those warnings off and hope for the best
- Find a new host, at least for my Rails sites
My fear was that even if these problems did not crop up again, other problems would. I thought it was time to look around at other options. Enter WebFaction
[
WebFaction
](http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=lefthip)
A very talented programmer that I had worked with last year had recommended WebFactionWebFaction. I thought I would give them a shot. The plans were actually around the same price as what I was paying, they offered a lot more space and bandwith, plus I knew that they specialized in Rails and also other options like Subversion and Trac hosting plus a ton of other forward-looking web applications.
I signed up and though I find their panel interface is not super well-designed and sometimes hard to follow and know what’s going on or happened, they have other great advantages. I had my site up and running in literally 5 seconds.
Like most web apps on WebFaction, installing a new Rails application is a 1-click thing - you create an app eg Rails in the version of your choice, then add your domain and then link the two together. Bang! Up and running and I had literally no problems whatsover - I just synced up my app files to the app that was created through the Cpanel, imported my database, changed the database settings, restarted the server, removed the public.html and the site was running - literally no hiccups. It was pretty amazing. And the site has been running great so far on Mongrel. I was dazzled.
As I said before, the WebFaction panel interface is not the easiest to understand - some of that comes down to design issues and some of it, I think, is just that they are more flexible and catering to more advanced users that might have more complex configuration desires.
Take this for example: I created a new domain and app, but didn’t realize that I had to add a www subdomain so that people could access my site isnorcreative.com. It was stupid of me to send out a ton of contract work emails today without double-checking the link but it just never occurred to me that the www wouldn’t work…. I’ve found that it is important to read carefully all the notes that pop up in the course of setting things up on their panel.
So my point is that WebFaction has been awesome so far. I love how easy it to get an application up and running and I love the bigger space and bandwith etc for the same money, and also the choice of many new applications such as Trac and Subversion etc alongside your basic PHP and HTML hosting etc. But it is probably best for intermediate to advanced users. I’m still using A Small Orange and they are a good host for PHP and beginning users but at this point I’m recommending WebFaction for people getting started learning Rails, and looking to set up a small Shared Hosting site.
I am available for Ruby on Rails consulting work – get in touch to learn more.