I just registered the TwitPrune.com domain, based on a suggestion from Rands on Twitter - “TwitPrune: Info on followers which helps me prune folks such as who hasn’t updated in forever.” Should be a nice little project to play with some weekend.
I heard about the Euruko 2008 conference a few weeks ago on the RubyIreland mailing list (thanks Chris!) and looked into going over to my first Ruby Conference. Well it’s only a couple of weeks away now and I’m all booked up, flights, accomodation and the ridiculously cheap conference ticket are all sorted. Yay! I’ll be arriving Friday evening and making my way down for the pre-Conf meetup and beers.
Matz, Koichi Sasada of YARV fame, Dr. Nic, David A. Black (author of Ruby for Rails), Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo (JRuby guys) are all confirmed presenters. That’s a pretty impressive line-up in anyone’s book. I’m really looking forward to this conference.
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.
Over the past week, I have been checking out my hosting options for a new Rails application that I’ll be putting into production soon. First I looked at the different hosting options available. From my research there seems to be two main options here - Shared hosting with Apache and FastCGI or a Virtual Private Server plan where you set up your own server.
Shared hosting with Apache and FastCGI seems to be a viable option for experimenting with RubyOnRails but I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable putting something into production on this kind of environment based on the comments and reviews I’ve seen of it. So that left the Virtual Private Server option.
I looked at all the major VPS players based in the US, as well as some of the Irish competition. In the end, it basically came down to a decision between Slicehost and RailsMachine. Both of these companies seem to get very good online reviews and are very competitive on price, especially when taking the weak dollar into consideration. RailsMachine seems to do a lot more for you in regards setting up your VPS for you with a full Rails stack, this is reflected in the price but still represents excellent value I’m sure. Inspite of this, I decided to go for the basic Slicehost plan. I want to take this chance to set up and configure my own VPS as I find that kind of thing to be useful in learning how things work and so don’t require the additional features of the RailsMachine hosting plan. I hope to use Deprec and Capistrano to automate the server setup and application deployment, if they both work as advertised it’ll make my life a hell of a lot easier.