a timocracy of one

I’ve spent plenty of time kvetching about problems running my Typo blog on Dreamhost. I acknowledge, though, that despite some of DH’s other hiccups, the core problem is that running Rails, on Apache fcgi, on a shared host is a Bad Idea. And while I can handle the initial set-up of a slice/VPS I don’t want to deal with the maintenance. And I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for a fully managed set-up, just to host small sites like blog.

So when my site started going down constantly, again, due to processing getting killed for being over the memory limit, most likely, I decided I would try out Dreamhost’s new “Private Server” offering, which is sort of a managed pseudo-VPS: cheaper than a true VPS, no root, they manage everything, but you do get virtualized/dedicated resources. Sounds perfect for what I need.

Unfortunately, there is a waiting list… and my site is down now! So I decide to email support and say, hey, I’ve sent some business their way over the years, my site is down now, any way to bump me to the front of the list. Well they did – but apparently side-stepping their usual processes. I show as still wait-listed in their web, panel, but all the sites go down on my account, all of a sudden, from the switch. It turns out they have moved me over to the PS, but the DNS didn’t get updated correspondingly for all my domains.

After a day or so of wrangling with their support queue, Jason got things fixed and it seems to be working. Now I just need to see how well it works for my needs. I’m going to just stick with the Apache fcgi, for now, because it works, I’m curious how the fcgi performs when not constantly being killed for exceeding the shared allowance of memory, and Dreamhost’s proxy set-up proxies you to a single mongrel by default, so I’d need to set-up up something like nginx to proxy to my mongrel clusters, and then keep all those up myself. Not that big a deal, but I am going to run with the out of the box experience a bit first, and see how little admin work I can do.