a timocracy of one

In my previous post, where I relate my experience using phusion/mod_rails on DreamHost PS, I was not suggesting it as a replacement for a nginx/mongrel_cluster. If you already running those happily, then you already have more control over things, and probably have everything in place to manage them. If you want a quick, easy deployment on a shared/semi-shared host, though, phusion is hard to beat. Especially since, if you are going the DH route, the single mongrel set-up of DreamHost PS requires you to juggle things around, and you’ll end up running nginx anyways.

So, in that case, for something as minor as a blog, or a minor app, it’s pretty easy to just use phusion.

Oh, and I did finally send DH a support ticket to turn my mod_rewrite back on – it’s disabled by default, since the default .httaccess people have routes to FCGI. First, though, I commented those sections out.

#RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
#RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

DreamHost support got to my ticket unusually quickly and sure enough it was enabled… and my site was throwing 500 errors for a minute, in the apparently usual config change hiccups. Before support could get back to me the second time, it started Just Working again. So yes, mod_rewrite and mod_rails on DH PS, seem to be a-okay. On the other hand, I have not tried phusion on purely shared hosting. My venerable Typo install runs my PS up to about 150-200 megs, on average, so that’s probably a no-go for me. I suspect a small merb app wouldn’t have any problems