You are correct about the age issue with Centos repos. It's the distribution that everyone loves to hate, but it has the "devil you know" advantage.
The good thing about RHEL/Centos is that it so heavily used in production, which means that whenever I encounter a bug/incompatibility (once every month or two) there will be documentation about how to work around it on Centos. The Ubuntu derivatives are much nicer to use as desktops (Mint is my current favorite), but in the past I found that the quality and quantity of the user contributed content about problem issues was lower, reflecting the greater proportion of novice users. That's an old datapoint and might not be true today. I've been working with Linux since 1996, so I've had a lot of practice with the compiling from source thing. I typically endup doing source installs of some subset of Postgres, ImageMagick, nginx, Ruby 1.8.7, pcre, readline, sqlite3, and then use RVM to build the 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 Rubies that I actually use. Still, If I wanted a different server distro than Centos/RHEL I'd probably try OpenSUSE first, again for the size of the production user-base. As for hosting providers - latency is everything. Choose a host that is close to your user base and you will get a better user experience. Regarding the $ per CPU power,I pay $50/month for a dual hyperthread "core" 2GB Nehalem VPS. That equates to one physical core. If I bought a physical server, say a DellR610 with dual quad core CPUs and 12GB of RAM for $2200. (say $110/month over two years). I could host it in a colo for $110/month. That's $220/month for 8x CPU and 6x RAM. So approx half the cost of $ per CPU. You can use vmstat to see if your provider is overprovisioning - the %steal column refers to the clock cycles where the virtual CPU has CPU work to do, but the vcpu isnt mapped to a pcpu, so your VM is waiting. If this % is higher than 2% or 3% you will see substantial pauses in your application. I've seen providers where this sits at 10% and spiked to 50% - the VMs were unusable, in my opinion. I have never seen non-zero steal time in the year I've been at nfoservers.com " On Mar 8, 2012, at 5:08 PM, Scorpio wrote: > Thanks for the input. as far as setting up a server goes. Sure I'll > probably struggle at some point as I'm not by far a god when it comes > to server config but the thing is if I wanna keep doing rails I gotta > do it because the few good (especially reseller) hosts charge such > ridiculous money no client of mine will be willing to pay that if he > can get a php host for like 1/10 of the price. I don't deal with big > fish thus I need to provide acceptable solutions for small amounts of $ > $ if I wanna get any business at all as freelance webdev is under- > payed as hell around here. > > I know there are some nice hosts out there but its all in the Euro > zone so out of the question. Too bad exchange rate that basically > makes the prices as sick. > > I'll take your input under advice and revisit the choice of the polish > vps but the company I've picked is quite transparent when I called > their technical department. Seems they originated from/do a lot of > business in Germany and its all Ordnung muss sein so I'm quite > pleased. > > As far as linux goes I'll have to recheck what webmin works on but I'm > sure I'm not gonna go for Centos for the life of me as I've had some > very horrid experiences with a host on that dostro as the repos are > ancient and I had to call the admin every 10 minutes to compile > everything from source also the setup was so badly done I dare say I'd > do it better before even beginning my research. It was just a > developers nightmare. > > Thanks for the input on solr. > > Any tips/guides/links on how to setup a ror server would be nice as > you seem to have a ton of experience > > On Mar 8, 1:06 pm, Peter Booth <[email protected]> wrote: >> I went through the same thing a couple of years ago, both for myself and for >> some clients I was doing performance work for. What I learned was: >> >> 1. Most VPS hosting providers are very vague about their hardware specs and >> what fraction of a multiverse server you are paying for. There are well >> known, reputable companies that will charge you $200/month for 1/8 of a >> physical core, whilst others charge $45 for a single core. That's a ratio of >> 32 to 1! >> >> 2. Capacity planning and performance tuning of virtual machines is hard. >> I've been doing it for six years and I was stunned by the inattention and >> lack of technical competence shown by some hosting companies. Over >> provisioning, misconfiguration and plain broken infrastructure abound. Be >> careful who you choose and adopt the Reagan slogan of "trust but verify" >> >> I found that i got the best hardware bang for the Buck from a specialist >> gaming server hosting company that rents out VPS on their surplus hardware. >> The late cues are excellent which is the crucial variable when you want a >> fast site. >> >> You have a better chance of avoiding over provisioning with a provider that >> uses Xen because Xen doesn't do memory over subscription. >> >> 3. There are a bunch of cool, slick Linux distributions available yet the >> most practical for serving a website is boring old RedHat/Centos. >> >> 4. The hobo solr recipe plus the solr website should be enough to configure >> a basic solr/rails install. >> >> Hope this helps, >> >> Peter >> >> On Mar 7, 2012, at 6:29 PM, Scorpio <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >>> I know it's a bit offtopic and for that I'm sorry but this community >>> saved my behind on a number of occasions. >> >>> Due to lack of an affordable RoR 3 host that's actually worth >>> something I'm gonna be setting up a vps webhost of my own, nginx, rvm, >>> shell, mysql,(long list) the works. But just today I read an awesome >>> tutorial on Sunspot by kevinpfromnm (Thanks m8!) and I'd like to >>> integrate that into a major app that I've been building for quite some >>> time. >>> Solr is required for that and as I do know how to setup a proper Rails >>> 3 host with nginx and webmin(+rails support) for the most part (sure >>> there will be stuff to figure out but hell.. got most of it in my >>> head) I've got no idea how to combine that with Solr. >> >>> Any thoughts /resources / places to ask would be great! >>> Thanks! >> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >>> "Hobo Users" group. >>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >>> [email protected]. >>> For more options, visit this group >>> athttp://groups.google.com/group/hobousers?hl=en. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Hobo Users" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/hobousers?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Hobo Users" group. 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