

Dreamhost slams Rails for not working well on shared hosting - pius
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/07/how-ruby-on-rails-could-be-much-better/

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SwellJoe
While I agree that RoR is pretty damned hard to use in a shared environment,
I'll point out that it is definitely possible. It took Jamie a couple of weeks
to get it all spinning...but Virtualmin can spawn mongrels, configure load
balancing in Apache, and still keep it all running as the user (making it safe
for shared hosting environments). Several of our customers have it
deployed...and while the load of the RoR stack is significantly higher than
PHP (or Perl/Python) under mod_fcgid, it can be done safely.

~~~
pius
Rails really exposes the overselling that occurs in most shared hosting
environments. Though this isn't by any means praise for Rails, it does explain
why a company that with massively popular shared hosting might be annoyed by
it.

I don't mean this as an indictment of Dreamhost. I recall when I first started
experimenting with Rails (years ago, pre-1.0 IIRC), Textdrive somehow had this
reputation of being "the Rails host." This was probably a combination of the
Textdrive folks giving some early sponsorship to Rails while having one of the
more customizable shared hosting environments available. Anyway, imagine my
surprise when I found that one could not reliably deploy a Rails app of any
substance (even apps developed by Rails core members) on TxD's shared hosting
because they kept killing the processes due to memory overages! Though it's
understandable from a business perspective why there are process (and, more
generally, resource limits) for shared hosting, it's also an absolute disgrace
for a hosting company to imply that one can run Rails on its shared hosting
when their policies preclude it and then all but call customers cheap for not
wanting to upgrade to a $150/month plan just to run a basic app.

~~~
SwellJoe
I don't know that that's an entirely fair assessment of TextDrive (and not
just because they're a customer of Virtualmin). They were pioneers in running
Rails in a shared environment...and the Rails development community is hostile
to shared hosting (perhaps because, like RoR exposing "overselling" in the
hosting industry, shared hosting exposes the extreme resource usage of most
RoR deployments). So, it has always been an uphill battle, and until you've
actually had to fight that battle, it's hard to imagine just how ornery it is.
That it took them a few months to work out all of the issues shouldn't be
damning evidence against them. It was untrod and undocumented territory, and
the fact that two years later most hosts still don't offer it ought to be
enough evidence that the hosts that can offer it safely are above average in
their technical savvy (or Virtualmin customers...).

------
zach
Really, this should be a _mea culpa_ , but instead it's a rant. Dreamhost was
too ambitious in trying to offer Rails hosting given their legacy
infrastructure. And now they're punting.

So why did they support RoR to begin with? "Ruby on Rails seemed to really fit
in with our company philosophy and we thought our existing customer base would
love it." Okay guys, so what have you learned here?

------
DarrenStuart
hardly a slam more of a polite nudge.

