Posts tagged with “Dreamhost”
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DreamMount
A Mac OS X tool for mounting your Dreamhost account on your computer, created for DreamHost’s API Contest (winners were announced today). I haven’t had a chance to give this a whirl yet, but it sounds pretty promising.
Thoughts on Affordable Web Hosting
I’ve created my share of websites, and in doing so, I’ve had experiences with a whole lot of web hosts, some of which I’ve loved, others I’ve really disliked. Below, I compiled a list of four of my favorite hosts, two that offer shared hosting and two VPS hosts. Being a college student, all four are affordable, and I’ve had a good experience with all of them.
Dreamhost
The Basics: Super-cheap, feature-rich shared hosting.
Pricing: $9.95/mo. for 1 domain registration, 500GB disk space, 5TB bandwidth, unlimited emails and databases. If you use the code KS50 when signing up, you’ll get $50 off your first year.
My Thoughts: I love Dreamhost. I hate Dreamhost. I’ve gone back and forth between these two emotions numerous times, but ultimately I’ve been really satisfied with my Dreamhost experience. It’s impossible not to like all the developer friendly features, like Subversion hosting and full SSH access. However, they don’t have the the greatest history of downtime, and they even accidently overcharged customers by over $7 million. All that being said, I’m still a happy customer, because, well, they’re really, really cheap, and, for the most part, I haven’t had any issues with them. I wouldn’t host anything mission critical with them, but for the average blog or personal site, they more than suffice.
- Dreamhost Plans
- Sign Up Page - Use this link to enable the KS50 promo code and get $50 off your first year of hosting.
EngineHosting
The Basics: No frills, high quality shared and dedicated hosting, aimed mostly at ExpressionEngine users.
Pricing: $10/mo. for their cheapest plan (400MB disk space, 10GB bandwidth, 100MB database, 15 emails)
My Thoughts: If you’re looking for a feature-rich host with gigabytes upon gigabytes of storage space, EngineHosting definitely isn’t it. On their lowest plan, you get 400MB diskspace, 10GB bandwidth, and only 15 email addresses, which means if you compare them solely on numbers to hosts like Dreamhost, they will likely always come out on bottom. However, their customer service and quality is excellent, especially if you’re building an ExpressionEngine site. I’ve used them for a client site for about 10 months now, and they’ve been absolutely stellar: the site hasn’t been down once, and I haven’t had to contact support once. I won’t think twice about using them for any future ExpressionEngine sites.
RailsPlayground
The Basics: Affordable VPS hosting, specializing in Ruby on Rails.
Pricing: $14.95/mo. for the cheapest VPS plan (10GB diskspace, 256MB RAM, 100GB bandwidth)
My Thoughts: Although I only used RailsPlayground for a couple months, I really enjoyed their service. I had never run a VPS (virtual private server) before, and I was able to pick it up pretty quickly, thanks to their excellent support: I would come across an issue, email them, and they would respond right immediately. Even though I no longer use them, it’s not due to a poor experience, but rather due to my desire to try out Slicehost. I wouldn’t hesitate recommending them to anyone looking for an affordable VPS.
Slicehost
The Basics: Cost-effective VPS hosting, with an amazing community.
Pricing: $20/mo. for the cheapest plan (10GB diskspace, 256MB RAM, 100GB bandwidth)
My Thoughts: Slicehost is currently hosting this site, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m no sysadmin, but following their excellent articles has helped me to build a fast, secure, and stable VPS. I was further amazed by their community when I mentioned an issue at 1AM on their IRC channel, and within 20 minutes, it was fixed. They seem to be completely focused on providing really reliable hosting, and it really shows. The result is rock-solid hosting, and I highly recommend them for anyone looking for VPS hosting.
Deploying Rails on Dreamhost with Phusion Passenger
Deploying Ruby on Rails has always been a pain, even with tools like Mongrel and Capistrano. On shared hosting, it’s nearly impossible. A little while ago, I noticed a project called Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails), which sought to make deploying as easy as uploading your application to your webhost. A few days ago, Dreamhost (my host) announced on their blog that Phusion Passenger was available on their servers. Naturally, I took some time to play around with it, and so far I’ve been extremely impressed. I threw together a quick app using Viddler.rb and deployed it to Dreamhost (you can see it here). Here’s a quick guide on how to deploy to Dreamhost yourself using mod_rails.
Getting set up
The first thing to do is to set up your domain or subdomain to use Passenger. Just go to the Manage Domains page on the DH web panel, and either create a new domain or edit an existing one. Check the “Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails)?” checkbox and set the web directory to where the public directory of your app will be. Below is a screenshot of my settings for viddler.fidgeting.net.
Next, you need to create your database, so just go into the Manage MySQL section of the panel. Create your database, which should be named as a production database. In my case, it was viddler_production. Then, make sure to change your database.yml to reflect the database you just created.
Uploading and running your application
Before uploading, make sure the first line of your public/dispatch.fcgi has the correct path to ruby on Dreamhost (which is /usr/bin/ruby). Then all you need to do is upload the files to Dreamhost and go to the domain. That’s it—your app is now completely functional. Amazing, huh?
If you need to first run migrations, you can do that from SSH with this command:
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
If you need to restart your application (anytime you change any files), just run the following command via SSH:
touch tmp/restart.txt
Getting Gems to work on Dreamhost
Since Dreamhost is a shared host, you can’t directly install gems on the server. Dreamhost’s wiki has a lot of information on different ways to get gems working, but they are all fairly involved, and I couldn’t get any of them to work. The way I did it was by unpacking the gems into vendor/gems by using the “gem unpack” command:
gem unpack <GEM NAME>
I’m sure there are better ways to do it, but this method worked perfectly for me.
Overall Impressions
Like I said at the beginning, I’m very impressed with Passenger, and so far I haven’t noticed any issues. The total time for me to deploy was about 20 minutes: way faster than with Mongrel or FastCGI. It’s definitely awesome to see a host as large as Dreamhost using this, and hopefully soon more will follow suit.