I recently got a VPS with Dreamhost, and am now serving this blog with 1 mongrel rather than a handful of FastCGI processes. So far the default out of the box DH config is doing me right. This blog doesn't see a firehose of traffic. Yet.

There is an issue, though. I got confirmation from the L2 support on this, as well. The default stats link breaks with the proxy setup for Mongrel. The answer is to do some more Apache config, but you don't have access to that config.

You also cannot "turn off" Apache from what I can tell (and have read on other blogs). I have a couple of feelings about this:

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Backstory

Back in the day I landed my very first website gig. I found a company that had positive feedback and placed well on a rating site or two. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had a gig. The company I chose for my host was CI Host. They were not good, and in the end they were dodging my calls and I had to issue some stop payments with my credit card company.

I got another gig for another site, and I needed a host. At the time I decided to just go with a really big company to compensate for the issue I had with the previous host. That company was Yahoo. It seemed like a great idea at the time for a few reasons (big company, search engine, nice control panel, supported perl and PHP).

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I am on my Dreamhost VPS now. I can see how heavy Apache or a Rails app is as I monitor my memory usage with top. I have a handful of rails apps running on my VPS, and I am more mindful of these sorts of things all of the sudden. I think I may have been one of those jackasses sucking down the shared host resources.... Sorry other people on lara.

Simplelog is a lightweight rails blogging app, and it's the one that I use. Typo on the other hand leakssssss. I have 3 instances of ruby running right now, though, and they are taking up about all the memory I have allotted for this VPS.

So I am learning about cacheing in a rails app, which is nice. Anything that you cache lives in the public folder of the app. Anything that is in the public folder is served by the web server rather than the rails app. So you can keep ruby/rails from spinning up and sucking down your resources for a page that can be cached. Sweet.

Note that anytime you deploy a new version of the app you reset your cache because you're pushing up a fresh copy of your public folder. That is if you didn't check in the cache from your development app. You would have had to turn cache on in development in order to do that, though.

VPS is cool, and I am not my administrator on Slicehost. Yay.

I don't have anything mind-blowing to share, but I have been busy with a lot of random things.

At work we're still working on this phat rails project. It's a support application for an even bigger project. Most recently we cobbled together an image server that serves images via Tomcat (which is what the primary application is server through) using an HTTP request. Why did we do this? Because Apache mod_rewrite is not our idea of fun. The rails app takes the images and thumbifies them in real time using RMagick (rails ImageMagick). I'll then use a lightbox plugin to show the full image. Yay.

I also have a handful of websites for clients for my "side gig." Most of them are PHP, which I decided that I am done with. That's probably part of the reason that I am also done with Perl. PHP just leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you know. It's like that rancid grease they use to cook your fries. The fries may taste good at first, but in the end they are really really really bad for you. That's PHP.

So I'm working on moving these sites to Dreamhost where I can happily serve them in Rails. It's slow-going, but you pick up some good tips with these sorts of things. These sites don't have a lot of complicated stuff going on in them, so it's been a good opportunity to get back to the basics with the MVC stuff.

I also just discovered last night that Network Solutions (the host) makes it really difficult to transfer a domain away from them. You cannot unlock the domain in the control panel if you are "just" the admin or tech contact for the domain. F that. Games like that may move Network Solutions into the realm of CI Host as the Most Bastard Host Company Ever. Probably not, though. CI Host were actually thieves. I got out of that deal thanks to Citibank stopping payment on some old charges. Seriously - they are crooks.

I'm also trying to find some freelance graphic artists in my area that won't cost a lot of dollars for some site design.

I did an MS 150 ride last weekend -- I rode my bicycle 150 miles in 2 days.

We're about to redo our backyard.

Good times all around....

But....

I don't want to be an administrator. I want to make the pretty pages that do the neat things. I don't want to worry about whether I have a hole in my firewall or deal with the Apache config stuff in general.

I spent the last 9 days playing with server config stuff rather than working on the apps that I have the hosting for. Don't get me wrong -- I had some good stuff in place. I just don't really know how secure it all is or how easy it will be to add additional domains to the setup. Apache whips me and security scares me.

I am impressed with the company and how quick the small slice that I had was. I also got a LOT of really good feedback from other SliceHost users.

I just wish they had a control panel that you could use to deal with the actual hosting bits if you wanted to. They do have a control panel, but it deals with very few details with the OS mainly.

So I have put in a request to upgrade to the PS service with DreamHost. I will still be subject to the filer issues they had recently. I will minimize my risk a little, though, by not hosting email with DH. Why would you when you can use Gmail for FREE? Gmail beats Squirrel Mail all day long. The DH IMAP and POP setup is a little squirrelly, too (ha ha).

I have learned more about the magic of DNS in the past few weeks. The DH issue was good in that respect.

So I have that going for me.

Background

I have 3 sites currently hosted with DreamHost. I actually had a fourth site that I was in the process of testing on DreamHost, but I pulled it back.

I have a handful of sites that are also hosted with Yahoo, Network Solutions, and 0catch.

There are things that I like about the control panels for Yahoo and DreamHost. I generally do not like the control panel for Network Solutions. It is not quite as bad, but very close, to GoDaddy's control panel that I fortunately no longer have to deal with.

There is another host company that I used a long time ago. They tried to rip me off, and I don't remember anything about their control panel. I can tell you, however, that ci host is the devil.

So I have some experience with a few different host companies.

In the near decade that I have been doing websites I have never had the week that I just finished....

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From CVS to SVN

I manage the website for a non-profit bicycle advocacy group. It's a great sandbox to try stuff out, I got the idea this weekend to take the code repository for the site, which was CVS on my localhost, and put it up in a Subversion repository on my host (Dreamhost). I have really taken a liking to svn - especially hosted not on my computer.

From what I can tell it went well, and I got it on the first run. How often does that happen? There was only 1 very minor glitch that was easily fixed. Here are the steps for this magical conversion....

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Hello, World. There - I said it. This is the first post on my shiny new blog. It's actually my second run at a blog, but you wouldn't know that because I couldn't get the first run to deploy. I will admit that I am not a Rails jedi (yet), but I did spend a LOT of time crawling through Google to get the thing running. I even found a nice blog that was written about a week and a half ago for the EXACT steps I needed to do to get it to work on the host that I am using (Dreamhost).

No dice. I suck at Rails.

Then I found some nice blogs that compared Typo to WordPress or Mephisto. I even saw where some people recently switched from Typo to Mephisto (which isn't being all that actively developed on). The results were a mixed bag. Typo seems to have a pretty heavy memory situation going for it, and on a shared host that poses a problem. It also had a pretty serious not running in the first place problem for me.

Enter SimpleLog. I started seeing some comments about why didn't you try SimpleLog. It is, after all, pretty simple.

I checked it out, and here we are after only about 2.5 hours of work. That includes the time I spent checking it out on my localhost. It also includes the time I spent helping my wife with a project that she is working on for my son's school. My svn version is only 7, with the first version being the initial checkin before anything else was done.

Maybe I don't suck so bad afterall. Tomorrow will be another day, though.