best setup for shared hosting?

rubyonrails-talk
1

is fcgi/apache still the best thing for shared hosting environments, or is there something better?

mongrel sounds awesome, but i'm wondering how it does with multiple apps on multiple domains since it sounds like you have to run a mongrel server for each application.

2

Here’s an easy way to look at it: One Mongrel server equals one instance of fastcgi.

Say your shared host allocates 2 fastcgi servers (dispatchers) for your application. That’d be like having two mongrel instances running. Roughly the same memory footprint.

Mongrel instances can be clustered using the awesome mongrel_cluster gem… you choose how many instances you need along with the starting port and it will start / stop the various processes. At that point it’s just a matter of forwading requests from Apache to Mongrel.

I don’t know how many shared hosts go the mongrel route. A few do though.

3

a2hosting does for example. You need to make sure your app runs in CGI mode first, then post a ticket on the support site and they’ll proxy your app to a mongrel. If you do have a bit of cash, I would still advise using a VPS instead of a shared host. E.g. send_file in its default setting (streaming the data) will crash your mongrel instance. Why? No idea, it just does. Also, any plugin or class that extends one of the Rails classes, will make your mongrel crash, you need to freeze rails in your vendor folder. I wouldn’t use a2hosting anymore (although they provided me with good support), just because Rails isn’t their main target audience. For shared hosting, I would certainly tend to look at railsplayground now (they use fcgi i believe).

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

4

Mongrel is what we recommend[1] when you're a hosting customer at PLANET ARGON.

We automatically proxy your unique ports through our main proxy servers[2], so you're able to manage your own front-end to mongrel with Pound[3], Nginix, or Lighttpd.

..and we encourage you to do it all with Capistrano!

For more information on our hosting services, visit Page Not Found (404) - Planet Argon

[1] http://www.dgibbons.net/articles/2006/8/8/why-you-need-multiple-mongrel-instances-with-rails [2] http://docs.planetargon.com/wiki/show/ProxyOverview [3] http://docs.planetargon.com/wiki/show/Pound+and+Mongrel

Cheers,

Robby

5

Robby:

I didn’t want to speak for you but I hoped you’d chime in. :slight_smile:

6

I used Litespeed + Ruby LSAPI as an experiment at http://freeonrails.com and it's been far more better than Apache/fcgi. It's surely worth a shot.

Thanks, Pratik