I am new to Ruby on Rails development and also fairly new to web
development in general, though I do have some experience and a CS
degree.
Will it be possible to link my personal hosted website into Rails
running on my home computer running XP and Instant Rails? I'm not
expecting lightning fast speed in any sense, but will I be able to
dish out some pages from home to the world?
In my very limited experience I don't see why it won't be possible.
I do have dynamic IP so I will have to send some sort of update to my
hosted account so it knows where I am. Any thoughts on accomplishing
that as well?
Most ISPs won't let you host a site using port 80. You have to
configure your server using a different port. That's what I did. As
for the server, use linux or freebsd, it's just too painful using
Windows.
I do exactly what you had planned using Instant Rails on my server for light-duty serving of Rails apps to the world at large. I also have an dynamic IP, so I subscribe to a dynamic IP service to keep the DNS world pointed to my server. There are many to choose from… I use "
changeip.com", which costs about $15 a year.
Will it be possible to link my personal hosted website into Rails
running on my home computer running XP and Instant Rails? I'm not
expecting lightning fast speed in any sense, but will I be able to
dish out some pages from home to the world?
Yep, no problem. Any files in your rails/public directory will get
served. Drop your website in there. Beware that if you have a page
named the same as something that should route to the rails app you
will be served the static page not the rails page. i.e. in config/
routes.rb you route the root 'welcome' to the some rails controller
and you also have public/welcome.html. You will not see your rails
page, only welcome.html will be served.
That said, I assume you are adding dynamic pages (i.e. a rails
application) in addition to your static pages... If you are just
looking to serve your pages you should just use Apache/IIS etc...
another thing... your other site should conisit of static pages -- I
don't believe theres any way to have (for example) PHP pages served
from your public folder.
I do have dynamic IP so I will have to send some sort of update to my
hosted account so it knows where I am. Any thoughts on accomplishing
that as well?
I use http://www.no-ip.com and have had zero problems. They have a
free plan you can try out, and the next step up is really cheap.
Generally these services provide some sort of client that updates them
on any changes to your dynamic IP. I'm using this with OS X and Ubuntu
linux (also have a win machine, but havnen't installed the client on
it)
Other options to consider -- check out VMware Server (http://
vmware.com - free) It's great for setting up low hassle experimental
machines (for example linux) that run within your XP box.
Note that some ISP's will harass you for having a server running on :
80. Others will just block the port altogether. Still, I was using
verizon dsl in Southern California and had about 15 users transfer and
recieve a few gigs of storage to/from Australia with no problems a
couple years ago.
Eventually I just paid the 15.00/month for textdrive. That said,
running your own server will be a good learning experience. Check out
the logs every once in a while, they can get interesting with all the
dirty botnets hitting your server.
I'm on hostingrails which I'm very happy with, 5 gig free space. I
did some research on having my own webserver and posted some questions
about it on newsgroups some time ago. Many people told me there are
alot of security issues with having a webserver running all the time
on your machine. There are port scans out there that look on every IP/
every port trying to find web servers running to bring down. I was
told you need to know alot of security stuff, need to upgrade latest
patches and so on all the time. It all sounded like a pain to me, to
what extent it was true I couldn't tell you, but maybe that all could
be interesting to someone else. If you end up doing it, I'd like to
know how it works out for you.
