Best/Cheapest Host (Page 1 of 2)

I used LayerShift for a year about 2 years ago. They were pretty quick at getting gems installed on the server for me and I rarely had any complaints. I'd recommend a VPS or one of RackSpace's CloudServers. Yuo can get them at a decent price and you'll have full control over the server.

Otherwise you could check out Heroku.

We've been on Slicehost (now Rackspace) for about 3 years.  They cost a little more but their support is amazing.

The reason I picked Linode was because Heroku doesn't allow you to save data to the file-system (correct me if I am wrong). I also wanted to take this opportunity to get a *nix box up and running. I have setup a few Linodes now it really doesn't take that long. I can try and walk you through it when you have trouble but for the most part I followed their documents.

Follow these in order:
Getting Started
RoR

That should get you started.

So I can better understand where you are in the process can you answer the following questions?

Have you purchased a Linode account yet?
Have you deployed a linux distro to your Linode (if not, I would choose Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - 32 bit)?

If not, get started there.

I would just go for it. You will know in 1 month whether or not it is going to work for you so if it doesn't (and I would be surprised if it doesn't) you are only out $20.

If you are going to sign up for Linode please use my referral link located here.

You can host as many RoR, PHP, HTML, ... applications as you want. The only limitation is how many resources are required to run each application. Based on my experience with Linode you can run a lot on their smallest package (Linode 512) so I would start from there (you can easily upgrade anytime). I am running 6 RoR applications on a Linode 768 package and it works great (I could probably get by with a 512 but I am hoping for a surge in traffic soon - fingers crossed :-)). But it all depends on the specific resources to run your application.

Sure, I used Apache + Passenger (or mod-rails as it is also known). Yes the tutorials Linode has for it are good, that is what I followed.

Yes - you must install anything you need since the Linode comes with just the OS loaded (after you select one and boot it). That is why it is so powerful, you control everything about your environment. It seems overwhelming but it is actually quite easy. I actually find it easier than installing Apache, MySQL, and other technologies on Windows. Ubuntu (and I am sure some other *nix distros) make it easy.

Hi ! I hope not to be troubling you too much with this message, To keep it short, I need help configuring my Apache Sever using passenger.

So far I've been attempting to do this locally, after installing the required gems I followed the steps listed on the tutorial at the end of the plugin installation, but I've Not been successful on the matter.

Basically what I want to do is to run a rails application I have on my machine at home, so my httpd.conf file looks like this:

LoadModule passenger_module /home/jose/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136/gems/passenger-3.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /home/jose/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p136/gems/passenger-3.0.6
PassengerRuby /home/jose/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p136/ruby

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName  localhost
  DocumentRoot /hamldemo/public
  <Directory /somewhere/public>
    AllowOverride all              
    Options -MultiViews            
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I figured it'd be right to use the parameter localhost to ServerName, since I intend to run it locally, but when I restart Apache, I get the following error(s):

Warning: DocumentRoot [/hamldemo/public] does not exist
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName
 ... waiting Warning: DocumentRoot [/hamldemo/public] does not exist
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

It says my RoR app does not exist, and somehow switched the name the server name ip from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.1.1.

Can you help me out? I basically want to learn how to deploy to Apache on my computer at home, and maybe you've already gone through all this.

Thank you, and sorry If this happens to trouble you, I've not found proper help on the internet,

Best Regards,

J

Well, it seems I have a lot of work to do then, ha ha...

There has got to be a way to do it, And I must find out the way, because I feel it's necessary in order to continue. Thank you anyways, I'll see how to get it to work, so far the link you provided hasn't been useful, the error is pretty messed up :S : let's see what I can do, and thanks again !

Sincerely,

Hello there !

You're totally right, the httpd.conf its better left empty, and since apache uses the virtual server concept the recommended practice is as you said to create a new file for every site you're trying to enable. This guide has been useful, as It contains details on how to get an app to run on localhost as I needed...
now I have got my application "running", but it only to display the literal contents of the public directory of my rails application, like:

404.html
422.html
500.html
favicon.ico
images/
javascripts/
robots.txt
stylesheets/

I'm getting close, but there's something I'm seriously missing to start my app as a Rails app I guess....

Thank you very much sir, your last post was really insightful !

I'll keep researching, and.. thanks for your time!

Good Luck !