Re: How to host Ruby On Rails on shared hosting

Peter De Berdt
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:29:28 -0000

On 05 Dec 2007, at 12:48, Alex Moreno wrote:

> And what about plesk? I´m also having problems but with plesk, and i
> suppose it must be similar steps...

Plesk may have gotten built-in RoR support by now, but i haven''t got
a clue whether it works or not.

On our dedicated server, we use vhost.conf to pass all rails related
requests to pound which balances the requests over one or more
mongrels (http://forums.rimuhosting.com/forums/showthread.php?t=389).
If you don''t have root access, you''re out of luck here,
you''ll have
to rely on the goodwill of your hosting provider to do this kind of
setup for you. Once it''s setup however, getting ssh access to your
own account should enable you to use capistrano to deploy your
railsapp and restart your mongrel/mongrel_cluster.

We only got Plesk to enable our customers to create new e-mail
addresses and host static or php sites on subdomains etc. We manage
the rails apps ourselves. All these control panels have the nasty
habit of fooling around with permissions and keeping to their own way
of structuring domain related folders. As a hosting provider you''re
just better off shielding the customer from it.
Using plesk as an example, they put account files in /var/www/vhosts/
mydomain.com/(subdomains/subdomainname/), cpanel probably uses
something like /home/username/. You really need to get familiar with
all of this when you want to reliably host rails applications on them.

Now, the problem with shared hosting, and especially the cheap ones,
is that they have to manage a lot of servers with thousands of
accounts. A lot of them outsource their support and even server
management to low wage countries. When it comes to solving problems
related to rails deployment, you''ll have to go through escalation
after escalation to finally get to a person that is quite linux
knowledgable, but clearly overstressed. The last thing he''ll want to
do is help you out by customizing his already very fragile server
setup. I gave up on shared hosting after going through these kind of
horror stories (and I''m being so kind not to go into detail on how I
was treated by some of them) and living a carefree and happy-
customers life for a couple of bucks extra per month. And if I need
support, rimuhosting''s is just unbelievably good, I just can''t
praise
them enough for it.


Best regards

Peter De Berdt


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