Hold it! Step away from the hosting space...
February 15th, 2008
I am sick and f^$king tired of reading about application service provider's Ruby on Rails sites going down for periods of time. I understand that things happen and every now and again there will be a bit of downtime. The thing that pisses me off to no end is that the number one cause of downtime I have read about lately is that their mongrels started acting up after their slice ran out of disk space. Seriously? WTF? You want to take people's money but you don't have the wherewithal to monitor your server for disk usage? Let me guess, you probably run your server processes as root along with your database connection too. If you can't figure out how to administer a VPS, either hire someone to do it or find a company that has those services baked into their hosting plan and pay for it. If you are a hosting company that claims to offer full stack Ruby on Rails hosting and doesn't back it up with these types of services, you're dead to me. Grow up and figure it out. It is really hard for me not to name names right now, but you know who you are.
In an effort to bring everyone's level of competence up a bit I am going to start posting some admin scripts to help you get started. I will put the first script up tomorrow that will include simple things like disk space usage / cleanup / warning. If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, hey, I pay $300 a month for Ruby on Rails hosting and I never get any disk space usage warnings, or hey my app went down and it took me 20 minutes to figure out that the problem was disk space usage, it's time to find another hosting company. You can get that level of service at a $30 a month do it yourself VPS company. I will continue to follow this up with administration tips and tricks as well as rules to live by so that you can have a decent reference. There will always be different ways of doing the things I post, but at least it's better than crashing for no explained reason!
In an effort to bring everyone's level of competence up a bit I am going to start posting some admin scripts to help you get started. I will put the first script up tomorrow that will include simple things like disk space usage / cleanup / warning. If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, hey, I pay $300 a month for Ruby on Rails hosting and I never get any disk space usage warnings, or hey my app went down and it took me 20 minutes to figure out that the problem was disk space usage, it's time to find another hosting company. You can get that level of service at a $30 a month do it yourself VPS company. I will continue to follow this up with administration tips and tricks as well as rules to live by so that you can have a decent reference. There will always be different ways of doing the things I post, but at least it's better than crashing for no explained reason!
4 Responses Follows
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on February 15th, 2008 at 04:22 PM I don't know if any of the $300 a month hosts will listen to you, but I'm in the $30 a month DIY VPS category, and I will certainly be looking forward to your advice on Rails Hosting.
on February 15th, 2008 at 06:54 PM I honestly don't care if the big hosting companies listen to me. People will eventually realize that they aren't worth it and move on. That is really what I am trying to communicate. My goal is to provide enough admin foo to people so that they can do it themselves.
on February 15th, 2008 at 08:23 PM Could you please email me the name of the hosting company that doesn't have this level of support? I don't want to have to find out the hard way when I look for a host. Thx.
on February 15th, 2008 at 08:51 PM Mike, I really don't want to recommend ditching somebody. Just use common sense. Besides there's only a few Rails hosting companies that charge that much money a month. I will however recommend slicehost. I like those guys.