Moved to Slicehost
Over the past few days, I’ve been working on moving all of my sites/applications to a new host. There were a number of reasons for making the switch, but it mainly boils down to this: I owed it to myself as a developer to obtain this experience.
Shared hosting is great for what it is, but I wanted more control. And with a few things in the pipeline, I figured I should go ahead and get familiar with my new, solid production environment in hopes of ironing out the kinks with this site, the portfolio, and ballpark.
As you may or may not know, I take this whole programming/design thing pretty seriously, and I’m always seeking ways to improve. Well, the missing piece to my wealth of knowledge (ha!) dealt with deployment. And I’m obviously not talking about deploying on a shared host, I’m talking about being handed an empty server and being responsible for everything on it. That’s both scary and fun. Scary because if something goes wrong, it’s all on me. Fun because I can do whatever I want :-)
After a couple of days of tinkering, I finally have all of my worthwhile applications deployed on a slice at Slicehost running Ubuntu Hardy, Ruby Enterprise Edition, Apache2 + Passenger, and I’m using Capistrano for deployment. I’ve already learned so much and I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead.
Having said all of that, I would greatly appreciate a heads up if you come across any issues. I think I’ve worked out all the kinks, but it’s too hard to tell. If you do run into something, please email me: ryan at rpheath.com.
Thanks!
Josh Friday, 06 Mar, 2009 Posted at 09:31PM
Interesting post. We recently moved our site to Joyent Accelerator hosting for similar reasons… shared hosting just wasn’t cutting it anymore, and we just didn’t have enough control.
Joyent has been very nice for us so far. There are plenty of hosting options… care to comment on why you chose Slicehost?
I would love to hear your thoughts on REE and Passenger vs. a fcgi mongrel setup. Also, do you have to roll your own backups on Slicehost? We have had to do this on Joyent, and it is the only thing about our new setup that worries me a little.
Ryan Monday, 09 Mar, 2009 Posted at 09:36AM
@Josh -
I’ve been in the market for a more robust hosting solution for a while now. I kept my eye on a few, and really liked what Slicehost was doing. They have a great community and support team, and I’ve been hearing so many great things about them for so long. Plus, being a rackspace subset helps. In the end, though, it ultimately boiled down to what I could get for my money. Slicehost offered a pretty good deal, so I eventually signed up. But like you said, there are a ton of alternatives out there, I just happen to feel the most comfortable with Slicehost.
REE and Passenger is the way to go. I should note, though, it really helps to consider what the Passenger team suggests: use the same version of Rails on all applications, use the gem version of Rails (not in vendor), and use Enterprise Ruby. That, in combination with some Apache tweaking, has my slice is running super smooth.
As far as backups are concerned, there’s a backup option on any plan for additional money (priced according to slice size). Straight from the horse’s mouth: