a timocracy of one: Blog back up after some hiccups moving to Dreamhost PS

Blog back up after some hiccups moving to Dreamhost PS

Tim Connor — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:19:00 -0700

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.

"Blog back up after some hiccups moving to Dreamhost PS" by Tim Connor

Wed, 28 May 2008 12:39:57 -0700

Protected/guaranteed/more memory/cpu.

"Blog back up after some hiccups moving to Dreamhost PS" by Theatons Toys

Wed, 28 May 2008 05:57:12 -0700

If your going to VPS but got no root access whats the point ?

"Blog back up after some hiccups moving to Dreamhost PS" by Barrett

Sun, 18 May 2008 18:14:39 -0700

I have had a similar experience. I even had a slice on slicehost for about 2 weeks. Then I remembered why I am not an admin. I decided to stay with the devil I knew in Dreamhost, and get a VPS. I’ve spent a week or so tweaking the configurations. At one point I had 3 rails apps running on the VPS in various states of config (cacheing pages, FCGI, Mongrel). I ultimately decided to take 2 of the sites that were pretty much billboards and take the rails out. There were some niceties that I was using with Rails, but at the core 2 of the sites didn’t really need rails. I did do server-side includes to keep life sane, though. I put my blog back on mongrel, too, and while mongrel is memory heavy it seems to leave less wake than the ruby instances spawned by fast-cgi.

I may play with lighttpd or nginx as well, but the out of the box config appears to be pretty good. I will just be sure to adjust my memory up as I bring more rails sites online.