Hosting

[theRocket]

Just to give this platform a test run...

Where is the WSBA site hosted? Any issues with developers getting
access? Availability? Running Rails?

I have gone through several Rails hosts recently -- some cheap but
painful, some sweet but expensive -- so I'm curious which way you
went.

RyanR>

[Scott]

Cool. First post!

The WSBA site is hosted on a WSBA-owned server in Martin Criminale's
basement. It's running Red Hat. (The other sites are hosted on an OBRA-
owned server colocated at EasyStreet. It currently is SuSE, but soon
will be FreeBSD.)

Martin and I both have root on the WSBA server. There are Capistrano
scripts for deployment. The Subversion repository and Trac issue-
tracking are all on my server running from my basement. There really
haven't been any issues with developer gaining access…because I've
been the only developer. ;)

EasyStreet and Martin donate their hosting, and we use the servers for
other things (static websites and Mailman), so it made sense to just
buy mid-range servers.

Each server could handle a lot more traffic, and another Rails app or
two. They're both running Apache + Mongrel Cluster, and Rails 2.0.

Availability is extremely good at EasyStreet and, except when there's
condo construction near Martin, the availability has been good there,
too.

There's a simple backup from the WSBA database to the OBRA server, and
vice versa. I also run Nagios monitoring from my home server.

Scott

[theRocket]

Sounds fairly solid to me. Which distro of Red Hat is on Martin's
machine? Do you have Capistrano tasks that do a checkout from your
Subversion repo, update symlinks, etc. - a la RailsMachine?

I had an account with them for a while - it's pretty slick, and was
designed for CentOS. Not sure if it would work for Martin's
environment, but they have published the Cap recipes as a gem. Their
position on using it outside of their framework is here:
https://support.railsmachine.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=43

I wonder if we could talk them into a pro bono slice? Or you are
pretty confident in the availability and security of the current set
up?

RyanR>

p.s. saw your blog post. you move fast!

[Scott Willson]

Hosting has been very solid, actually. <knock>wood</knock>

There's room for improvement in almost every aspect of, well,
everything. It's the "just good enough" approach in action. Sometimes
the perfectionist in has to grit his teeth, but I haven't found a
better to keep delivering software and maintain my sanity.

I think the WSBA server is SELinux, Fedora Core 6.

Yeah, the Capistrano task does all of the standard Rails deployment
stuff. It's 'cap deploy -f local/config/deploy.rb', wait a minute, and
the site's updated.

Since we've already purchased servers and have free hosting, I can't
see the value in looking for a shared environment. It is possible that
EasyStreet might donate colocation for the WSBA server like they do
for the OBRA server. That would put the server in a secure, monitored,
air-conditioned, data center as opposed to a residential basement. No
offense, Martin! I say that as the proud owner of a similar server-
hosting basement, and the WSBA server uptime has been fine.

Scott