Hello Ryan! Welcome to Radiant on Dreamhost! To sum it up, Dreamhost's support for Rails in general SUCKS. They run on a dynamic-count fcgi setup and they will not do anything to help you. After 2 months of back and forth with their support, they will not do ANYTHING to their default box setup. 'It's set up for a reason' attitude. Problem with Dreamhost is by default they put a cap on you for 200MB RAM usage, and as soon as you get --5-- processes running of Radiant or any slightly-heavier Rails script up, you will git that point and their process killer will ruthlessly start killing your processes; As well, I found if I got too fast of traffic with them, my CPU would spike HARD (From the dynamic fcgi launching) and it too then would kill the processes. For many sites, a fixed 2-process fcgi setup would do well, it cuts down on memory usage overall and you get some serious speed increases because you're not relaunching a process over and over (As soon as one of the 5 processes die down, it kills them too, with how DreamHost is set up) - I couldn't handle 500-600 visitors with DreamHost at all. Impossible. My site would be down for 40-50 minutes out of every hour, just because of apache taking a moment to respawn a ruthlessly-killed fcgi thread(s). I couldn't imagine trying to manage them with the 1500-2200 visitors I get daily now.
Myself? I chose to host my own system. Rather than a dedicated box, I went for a VPS, which has been actually very rewarding, but let me tell you, getting a Mongrel cluster set up and optimized is a headache you may NOT want to partake in. If you don't want to manage your own hosting (As your email seems to point out) there are solutions, depending on the $ you're looking to spend. There are plenty of services, but the one that pops into my head is http://www.hostingrails.com/ - They offer cheaper fcgi (Which I likely wouldn't touch again due to the dynamic allocation issues I had on DreamHost), or starting at $9.79, you can go Mongrel or $13.98 and up for Mongrel Cluster. Just because it says 'Rails' on their features page, does NOT mean they have any clue how to run a Rails service. It's like saying 'Free diamond ring with any purchase!' and then giving you a plastic ring with a diamond chip taped to it. Anyways, hope this helps. Andrew Ryan Heneise wrote: > What are your best experiences with web hosts for Radiant? Are there > any hosts that are particularly Radiant-friendly? Where do you host > your Radiant sites now? Are you happy with them? > > I'll start... > > I've been hosting several Radiant sites on Dreamhost, but I've been > only marginally happy with the service. It tends to be pretty slow at > times. > > I've had the best luck with my own server, which is a colocated Apple > Xserve. I have full control over it, but it is a pain to manage, and I > don't like being stuck with the full liability of hosting customers' > sites _and_ email and all that goes with it. On the other hand, Xserve > is an awesome environment for Rails/Radiant. And I'm really looking > forward to trying Leopard server - it really seems ideal for this sort > of thing. > > - Ryan > _______________________________________________ > Radiant mailing list > Post: Radiant@lists.radiantcms.org > Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ > Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant > > _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@lists.radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
