Curiouser and Curiouser! on hosting

It was an interesting experiment but I think it's over

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:35:42 +0000

I signed up for shared hosting with TextDrive last year so I could start developing Rails applications. At the time they were a small company with big ideas and the service, although a little quirky, felt like doing business with friends -- there was a lot of excitement and energy in the air. At the time I remembered thinking that it would be very hard to scale this up and charge what they were charging ($12/mth). But you can hope.

Over the last year there have been some problems. I think people on Gilford and Harwood have been suffering most recently but Barclay and Bidwell (my server) users were plagued with unreliability problems (and very tiresome 1hr+ restarts) lasy year. I guess things have improved somewhat since their move to a new datacentre but it's hardly been anything to make a song and dance about.

At $12/mth I wasn't complaining particularly loudly. I didn't have live applications unable to serve customers. I hadn't recommended paying clients to use the service. It wasn't hosting my email or anything vital. In short, the interruptions to service were irritating and I would wish for better but I still felt I was getting, more or less, what I was paying for.

Now I'm getting closer to releasing an application, developed with a friend in the U.S., and trying to test it and running into the TextDrive AUP and a watchdog terminating my processes with prejudice -- no exceptions allowed. Let's just say these are not mammoth processes so I was quite non plussed. I also wasn't terribly impressed that the terms the watchdog works under were not listed in the AUP (it is even more aggressive than what is defined there).

So, TextDrive has been an interesting experiment but I just don't buy running applications on shared hosting at $12/mth. Apparently their business hosting packages have higher limits and less contention on the box. Frankly, at this point, the balance in my goodwill bank doesn't extend to giving them $60 for a month to find out.

Instead I am going to look at using a Virtual Private Server. You may still have contention issues, I'm concerned about the real life performance you get, and it means having to administer the box yourself but I have realised, yet again, that I don't like giving up essential controls over my environment to other people. VPS seems to be a good compromise between shared hosting and the costs of a dedicated server.

It seems the experiment may not so much be over as moving to a new phase.

Quick update on applications hosting

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:02:58 +0000

Yesterday at Warren Noronha's suggestion I signed up with Quantact for a 128MB VPS account at $25/mth. That's roughly twice what I am paying TextDrive for shared hosting with them.

So far I'm pretty impressed with Tim (CEO of Quantact) and how he operates. Everything was setup very smoothly even whilst we were having trouble getting my details through his payment gateway (not being in the US or having a state seemed to get it in a tizzy). About 20 minutes after I signed up I was SSH'ing into my new Debian server as root.

Debian/sarge is completely new to me but seems nice and, with help from procreate and the highly available srbaker I was able to get going. When I see how easily a lot of the software I need for my Rails installation went in I guess I may have a greater appreciation for the concerns of packagers. Once sr had me setup with backports it all went in smooooth.

My intention is to move an application I had been trying to develop at TextDrive over straight away. That app was bumping into the process watchdog and only likely to continue to do so. We'll see how well it fairs on a VPS with a pretty cramped memory footprint.

Some observations: I have no idea of the contention on the box but performance, from what I've seen, is much better than I expected. When you see (as I did on some sites) guarantees of only 100MHz performance it sets you up for some pretty low expectations. Time will tell, i'm giving this experiment at least a month. So far it seems snappy. Also the 100Mbit connection makes life fast.

If things work out I will probably upgrade another notch and move a number of services I currently host with TextDrive. Whether, in the long term, I keep anything with them is not settled in my mind. I really don't want to be administering email servers and the like. So there might be a role there. We'll see.

Certainly I am learning, with the help of friends, a lot about hosting and how to make the best of it.

Getting the full Rails stack installed on Debian

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 15:06:31 +0000

Ezra Zygmuntowicz has worked out the details of getting the full Rails stack working on Debian and it's pretty smooth sailing. I went with Quantact not Rimu but that seems to make no difference (as you would expect). I also opted for Postgresql8.1 rather than MySQL, used RubyGems 0.8.11 instead of 0.8.10, and haven't decided yet whether I will install a mail server or not.