Fred's Blog

I have been hosting many Rails applications in many different "SHARED" Hostings. and all I can say is that the best of them is Rails Playground...

Here are my reasons:

1. Uptime is very good.

05:38:15 up 108 days, 9:56, 7 users, load average: 0.46, 0.46, 0.45

2. Load is very Low

Load average: 0.46, 0.46, 0.45

for 2 x dual core cpus, this load is Awesome. The maximum load I have seen is like 1.9

3. Service is excellent

Every email I send I get the answer right back, with a good solution and help.

4. I asked for Git support

and I got it, they installed git right away.

5. FAST Hardware

in my rails application I get between 100 to 200 Req/sec using a single mongrel. I even get near results using FCGI !!! of course my app uses a LOT of caching, as well, using rails 2.0 edge from trunk. you might not get same results...

6. Fast connection

They have resonably fast connections... From the the other side of the world (Japan, Thailand, Malaysia) I get real good speed.

7. Free 2 mongrel Instances

I get 2 mongrel for the developer plan.

8. Free 1GB subversion repository

if i had to pay for http://svnrepository.com/ it would cost another 5 USD month.

9. All newer gems

On my machine, 76 gems installed. well updated.

SVNrepository.com is a real good choice to pay if you need more space to host many applications and more support.

So, for for the newbie and junior Programmer, RailsPlayground is definitely worth it for the "price".

Disclaimer :

IT IS JUST MY PERSONAL OPINION, for a shared Hosting I don't guarantee you will get the same service as I get. you might not get same results as I get... basically, you might not be lucky as i am. :)

NOTE:

If you have a critical application I do recommend to host on AMAZON EC2, or get your own Server Stack or Clusters.

I had to do a search with ferret for a single model and multiples queries, plus sorting in pagination.
for example, I wanted to search for a User with name="John Smith" AND city="atlanta" AND state="ga" AND zip=100*

here is my implementation

The model code, I got it from Igvita Ferret Pagination in Rails and slightly modified.

Auto_complete by default uses full text search to the database.

That can be very slow if you your database is big...

so, let use memcached instead.

. Make your Rails app faster with memcached. Part 1

In this article I describe how to make your application increase considerably in performance

Required Applications:

• 1. cache_fu (plugin)

./script/plugin discover ./script/plugin install cache_fu

• 1. memcache_client

gem install memcache_client

• 1. memcached

(http://www.danga.com/memcached)

I love Sphinx search, but most shared hosting won’t have sphinx…. Sphinx returns the results already “will_paginated” :)

So I have to use my second most favorite indexing tool, acts_as_ferret.