Up and Running on Slicehost
Update: I’ve set up my own personal slice since this post - running Rails, Nginx, Mongrel and MySQL on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon - so if you’re to be signing up for Slicehost I’d be grateful if you’d consider using this Slicehost Referal Link.
I took this afternoon to kit out my new VPS slice with the full Rails stack - Rails, Apache, Mongrel, MySQL. I have to say it did take longer than I thought it would but mainly because I was getting an error when trying to use Deprec. I figured that it’d be no harm to do a manual install to learn my way around though, so thats what I ended up doing. I think it was a worthwhile exercise but now that I have a working snapshot backed up that I can roll out when necessary, I think I’m going to rebuild my slice and give Deprec another shot. I’ll take my notes for this afternoon and post them here over the next few days so anyone about to tackle their first VPS install might be able to learn from my wrong turns.
Performance so far on my slice is average but again this is probably in large part due to not having doing any optimization on the server setup yet. If setup optimization doesn’t improve things then I’ll have to tidy up a few things in my app - there’s plenty of room for improvement here as well, such as removing unused plugins etc. If at that stage performance under a simulated load isn’t of a sufficient standard I have two options. First, I can take the easy way out and upgrade to a more powerful slice. Or secondly, I can do some investigating, root out the causes of any performance issues and refactor or rewrite those problem areas. At the moment, I think I might even take a little from column A and a little from column B - upgrade my slice to improve performance while I work on resolving the underlying issues. Thankfully, I’ve a bit more time to address any of these things before I have to make a definitive call one way or the other.
I just started with Slicehost a week ago. I’m pretty impressed after coming from a shared hosting environment where I was never able to successfully get rails / mongrel / apache / mysql going properly.
Got everything up and running at Slicehost in a few hours time, and it was my first time (not counting the shared hosting attempt) getting Rails going on a non-windows box.
@Keith - I’m impressed with Slicehost too. I use another hosting company for shared hosting but didn’t want to even try and get a RoR app up and running in that kind of environment, I figured it was going to be a complete waste of time both in regards the amount of issues I’d have getting things installed and also in regards to performance.
The install on Slicehost was relatively painless and performance is looking better this morning than it was last night, so the lag I experienced then may have been down to network traffic rather than strain on the servers resources.
I still want to get Deprec working with my slice though as it’ll mean that I have an easily replicatable deployment model. Did you install your Rails stack manually?
Slicehost is a fantastic service. Uptime for my server is now 370 days and counting.
@George - Nice!
The slice I’m currently working with is for a project in work but I’m so impressed with Slicehost that I’m thinking of getting my own slice for personal projects and playing around with.
I understood you’re based in Ireland — isn’t the performance from Europe too poor?
I have had this experience with Slicehost as well as Amazon EC2
@jan - yeah, all the customers for my slicehost based app are based in Ireland but so far we’ve had no complaints about performance. (Also all the customers are based on corporate LANs with very good internet connections - so that helps too.)
There is a small lag when making the initial connection to the server but once the user is logged in a significant portion of their requests are dealt with by AJAX without needing a full page reload - this helps make the system look more performant.