MediaTemple GridServer revolutionizing shared hosting? Not today. 6
A while ago I gave mt’s new GridServer a whirl. I was looking to jump the DreamHost ship for my primary hosting, especially the Rails stuff, and MediaTemple had this new cool sounding GridServer at a quite reasonable price – $20 bucks a month. At that price-point they are positioning themselves between cheap shared hosting and VPS/dedicated services, and I was intrigued. The potential for gradually scaling up, and the potential reliability gain were tempting.
First off, though, it’s not a Grid, technically. It’s more of a cluster, and clustered computing is not exactly groundbreaking. The only ground being broken here is a VPS alternative at $20/month.
And then you get to the fact that it’s hard to tell exactly what is Gridified. By reading around the best I could tell is only the web-stack. Well, as it turns out, most of my reliability issues with DH have not been because of the webserver crashing: it’s been router issues, or problems with the DB servers, or general datacenter issues. Well, these are all things that are not resolved by “the Grid.” Either your host already handles them well, or it doesn’t. I have no comment on mt about these, since I didn’t keep my account long enough to get a real sample-size for that sort of info.
Okay, so we’ve got a clustered web-stack for $20/month, that’s coo,l right? I still think it sounds like a good idea, but what do you get for that? Oh, a 64 meg Rails container to run mongrel in? Well that isn’t going to go very far; better bump that up, so now we are looking at $45/month and we are getting into low-end full VPS solutions.
That’s the problem I had basically – the lack of flexibility of the GridServer environment didn’t make the bargain seem worth it. For instance, there is no set-up for clustering Mongrels, and that shoots down the easily scalable claim. There is no way to run Trac, since it’s python, they don’t have mod_python installed, and the clustered environment doesn’t work with fcgi, by it’s very nature. It looked like Collaboa, a Rails alternative wouldn’t work, either, since it requires the ruby svn bindings, and you can’t install compiled gems onto the Grid.
Overall, I’d say once they get some of the initial weak points worked out it will probably be worth looking at again. Until then pick your poison for affordable VPS. You guys can Google™ that as well as I can, and will probably get the same list of Rails friendly hosting setups that come up every time that question is raised. In fact, if someone is happy with their affordable VPS, for running Rails, please comment here, as I am still stuck on Dreamhost.
Articles via rss or email
We’ve found RailsMachine very good, where we’ve had two low-to-medium-traffic applications deployed on a single VPS for a month with no significant issues. But it’s not at the “low-end” of VPS solutions—you’re paying a premium here for convenience and high-quality support, in my opinion.
If we were to look askance, at this stage I think it would be in the direction of Amazon’s EC2 (for even greater scalability, as there’s not a whole lot of difference in cost), or towards RailsPlayground, which at $40/mo for a VPS is certainly affordable. But RailsMachine has been ideal for us so far.
Ya, I might do RailsMachine when I need something more serious – I just don’t want to be stuck on DreamHost untill then. Once you start getting into high-end VPS, though, colo starts making sense as well. I guess it basically depends how managed the VPS is: if I have to manage a whole virtual OS, why not just have the whole box for myself.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at RailsPlayground.
HostingRails.com has been a good find for me because for $20/mo I’m running a mongrel_cluster of 4 that is load balanced via mod_proxy_balancer on one of their apache2.2 servers. ‘wicked fast so i don’t have many complaints thus far.
sent a request to MT for trac, their response:
They told me it’d be when they had their python container ready, but maybe they’ll do something earlier, then. I’d be fine replacing it with Collaboa, but that won’t work, either, due to needing the svn ruby bindings.
So all around it’s the sort of thing where maybe after some time and they have enough set-up, it’ll work, but until then the lack of flexibility is a killer.
I can say many months later, Grid isn’t much better. They are constantly down. The reliability is absolutely terrible. And they are SLOWWWWWWWW. The dv server, $100-150/mo, however, are great.