

Why would an ISP not offer up-to-date Ruby support? - mud_dauber

I&#x27;m asking out of genuine curiosity, not spite.<p>Just tried to create a Rails app on Dreamhost, only to learn that they only support Ruby 1.8.7 on shared server accounts. It&#x27;s my understanding that v1.8.7 is very obsolete if not entirely deprecated. If so, I&#x27;m a bit perplexed why a major ISP, with prominent mention of Ruby &amp; Rails support in their wiki, wouldn&#x27;t want to keep up.<p>Am I missing something?
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atmosx
Because for them, probably the cost of maintaining rails applications out of
the box, is bigger then the approximate gain of offering an up-to-date ruby
installation on their servers.

I don't feel like 'Dreamhost' is _prominent_ in the Ruby community. Actually
I'm the ruby mailing lists and at least 6 ruby-related IRC channels (I don't
do Rails yet, I'm more of a Sinatra afficionado). I never seen ONCE dreamhost
mentioned there.

Even on rails website[1], the recommendations are: Heroku, Rails Machine,
Brightbox, Engine Yard for hosting, Rackspace (hosting rails website IIRC) or
Linode.

[1] [http://rubyonrails.org/deploy](http://rubyonrails.org/deploy)

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viraptor
The wiki says "You can use rbenv or rvm to install other ruby versions on
DreamHost". I guess they just don't care enough to upgrade system-wide, or
have some internal issues that hake it harder than expected.

Also, they're your hosting provider, not ISP. Your ISP provides you access to
the internet.

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mud_dauber
Apparently using rvm to upgrade requires sudo access. I'd have to upgrade for
that. Also, tks for the hosting provider v. ISP clarification.

------
gary4gar
DreamHost is mostly used for LAMP stack. you might want to Use heroku which
offers first-class ruby support.

    
    
        https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/ruby

~~~
mud_dauber
Thanks - much appreciated. I've used Heroku to test a couple of "hello world"
apps, but was hoping to use DreamHost's shared server account in order to
learn the tricks of deployment for myself.

