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.

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 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.

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 modrewrite 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).