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.
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.