New Server! 11 comments
You’re looking at my blog on my new VPS server at Rimuhosting.
Part II of the Complete Guide to Plugins will be posted on Monday.
Nuby on Rails
Geoffrey Grosenbach / Ruby / Code / Graphics / Design / Rails / Merb / Javascript / CSS
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Finally grow tired of DreamHost Rails performance or did you reach their hidden CPU limit?
Which plan did you get? Did they setup a mail server for you or did you have to do that on your own? I had tried another VPS service and their idea of tech supporting was sending to me the docs on sendmail.
scott.
Dreamhost is still a cheap host and gives you tons of bandwidth. For my Rails-based sites that can be cached or are small, it’s fine.
But with Typo on a shared host, there were times (this week) where I would get weird errors like “Uninitialized constant Article.” And the server load would often be around 5, which is horrendous.
I can definitely notice that I’m running on 128 MB of RAM here on my VPS, but now it’s my responsibility to manage my own resources. And generally, it’s blazing fast. I’m running lighttpd and followed ezra’s install instructions for Debian. I added a FastCGI version of PHP (for Mint) and got a little help from dc running it all on lighty.
I’ve heard that Rimuhosting’s customer support is great, but if you’re not familiar operating Linux exclusively from the command line, you’ll have a lot to learn. I did the whole setup on their US$29.95 plan. I’m not running a full mail server, but I did setup Postfix so I can send mails out from cron.
My custom Mint summarizing queries (for the “Recently Popular Pages” below) do bring it to a crawl. I’ll be working on a less memory-intensive solution (they’re only run once a day).
So I’ll see how it goes and write a report here in a month.
I think you made a great choice. I’ve been using Rimu for close to 3 years and they are by far my favorite. In the meantime I’ve also worked with Textdrive, PowerVPS, and quite a few other basic/shared hosting providers.
They’ve always gone above and beyond with support and answering my silly nuby questions. Usually, if you ask them to install things for you during your account setup they will. I setup a new VPS with them recently for a project and they installed Ruby, Rails, SVN, and a few other things for me.
Hosting is the only real nightmare I deal with as a developer – so I want to give them props for their great work. Also, I hope your experience is as pleasant as mine has been!
I assume you are running MySql on your host as well? So you have lighttpd and mysql and 128MB of RAM is enough?
It seems to be enough for now…I need to tune MySQL down a bit, but I’m not swapping much and am at 87 MB active.
hmm… how did you get the memory footprint so low? I have a little box running postfix, lighttpd, mysql on ubuntu and its running just under 256mb. Can you reccomend a resource for tuning?
weird, i think i must have been doing the exact same thing with my new rimu account, the same level, at teh same time on sunday.
the instructuctions you listed were even the ones i used. but they weren’t quite complete for me. i wish they had explained how to setup lighttp to the end, with it booting on load and being hte default, not apache2. where did you go for information
I use SQLite on my VPS, don’t remember reading anything about why Typo couldn’t use it instead of MySQL.
@paul: I had to figure a few things out on my own. I’ll write an article here as soon as I verify that I did them the proper way!
Yeah I love Rimu too. We’ve had two VPS’s since January here, and just added a dedicated server. Their service is great, they set the boxes up well, and we’ve never had any problems with them (unlike the bad experience at our previous host, A2).
Our dev VPS runs Rails, Lighttpd, Trac, Postgres, phpPgAdmin, etc. all in 128MB (on Debian). I wouldn’t say it’s fast… but it gets the job done. I’m sure it would be fine for low volume, database-unintensive production apps. It only really slows down when some query is really hammering the DB.
One problem with Debian was that stable only has Ruby 1.8.2; had to figure out how to get 1.8.4 out of testing.
Re lighty & apache, I had to remove the Apache startup links in /etc/rc2.d and /etc/rc3.d to prevent them from starting up on boot. And also put in links from these dirs to /etc/init.d/lighttpd to enable lighty on startup. (there’s probably a better way to do this…)