CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railslinuxvps
ed123
ed123

Reputation: 23

Hosting Rails - Going the VPS route?

I am a professional windows/.Net developer who has been slowly learning rails/ruby/python/etc. in my free time. I have also been playing with various Linux distros over the past 8 years or so. One thing I am definitely not, however, is a nix Sys Admin.

I am at the point where I want to start doing my side projects in Rails. In my search for hosting, I am finding shared hosting for Rails to be restrictive and lacking in control. I want to be able to run whatever ruby/rails version I want. I am thinking about taking the plunge and getting a cheap VPS plan from something like linode or slicehost and just do it myself. Ultimately, I will start by hosting 1 or 2 low volume RoR apps running on top of MySql. Am I getting in over my head? The whole "maintenance" part makes me a little hesitant. At the same time, it would be a great learning experience.

Would it make sense to install something like Ubtunu server on a VM using Virtual Box so I can do a trial run? If so, can you recommend guides, books, or in general things I really need to watch out for.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 506

Answers (3)

smathy
smathy

Reputation: 27961

I disagree with the other answers. If you're sensible, and understand what a port is, there's really not that much to administer:

  • Web server
  • Rails app server
  • MySQL
  • iptables
  • (if you need it) an MTA like postfix

The default configuration of cron, ntpd, sshd and rsyslogd will work fine on Ubuntu out of the box.

All of the above are easy to learn about, very well documented, and there's bucket loads of help available on https://superuser.com/ and IRC and many other places.

Yes, there's a learning curve. No, I wouldn't recommend starting with a banking app. In my experience, it's all very much within the capability of anyone with a university level knowledge of computing.

PS

Use the (latest) LTS version of Ubuntu.

Upvotes: 0

rajasaur
rajasaur

Reputation: 5460

DotCloud and Heroku are 2 good options. The biggest disadvantage to managing your own server (using Linode/SliceHost/EC2) is the system administration that you mentioned. You have to be very careful in what you install and the ports that are open.

Ive been doing part time administration for a few years now and made a simple mistake of making postgres' password simple enough and that caused someone to hack into my Linode box. This was just a few hours after I made that mistake and had to fix that within 24 hours as Linode's sysadmins were getting notifications about that. Each of these services (Linode etc) have a guide on how to secure your box , so please make sure that you read them up once you decide that you are going to use such a service. The most basic thing to do would be to lock down SSH but there are many ways by which you can get screwed if you dont follow the security policies.

Upvotes: 2

Dave A-R
Dave A-R

Reputation: 1169

Go for a fully managed VPS if you have the money for one. That takes out a lot of the ball ache from handling the server stuff while you can focus on getting rails right. LiquidWeb is my favourite and has the best support out there in my opinion, but I've had some good experiences with HostGator too. Shop around a bit though, you might find something more suitable.

Setting a VM up with linux is a fine way of practicing, though you'll be better off going with a distro that your eventual VPS will be using. CentOS seems to be the preferred one by hosts at the moment, especially on the lower priced hosts.

Upvotes: 0

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