[Radiant] Best Hosts for Radiant?

[Andrew Klein]

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 at lists.radiantcms.org
> Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/
> Site:   http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
>
>