setwave

Alright, I admit I learned my lesson about serving a rails site in a shared hosting environment. The biggest takeaway is to make sure and freeze your gems and rails itself. This way your site will continue to run when changes are made to the shared hosting environment.

Case-in-point…

Goblr is ugly as sin but it served as my first attempt at coding a rails site. It was the perfect vehicle for me to learn about all the nuts and bolts which were part of rails 1.2.3, unix admin, and mysql. I put zero emphasis on the UI and concentrated more on the back-end development and feature sets. One of these days, I will contract with a designer to sizzle up the GUI. It’s flat out embarrassing, I know. But sacrifices must be made. It would still be on my dev machine if I sought perfection.

The problem started back in December when rails went version 2.0.x. My hosting company OCS Solutions automatically upgraded to the new and improved version. This wasn’t a huge deal, I suppose, except Goblr went down instantly. I ended up freezing rails to the last version I knew it worked with and the problem didn’t go away. This site gets relatively zero traffic – except for hordes of Muslims trying to sneak a peak at burka wearing belly dancers. So, I didn’t mind it was down at the time. But I also didn’t want it to go to the deadpool.

Last night, I was looking at some traffic reports and Goblr hadn’t flat-lined like I thought it did. WOW! I’m not sure where the magic happened but I don’t care. It lives in all it’s hideous glory. Now, I say this half-jokingly of course. If the site had any sort of traction I would’ve fixed it instantly. All of this just happened at the same time I was trying to finish the first version of Squabl so it was the last thing I wanted to deal with at the time.

I’ve since moved on to a different hosting provider (Slicehost). Some of my earlier iterations of the Goblr video feeder were huge memory hawgs. And I mean huge. It wasn’t uncommon for it to use up 250-300MB of memory while it was running. OCS would manually kill these processes if they ran too long. Some of the bigger feeder jobs would take 6-8 hours. Anyway, OCS is a great hosting provider if you’re looking to cut your teeth in a shared hosting environment. I’ve never once had any of the same problems I had with my brief stint on Dreamhost. OUCH! That was painful. Big ups to the OCS team for putting up with my newbie on rails shenanigans!