On Tue, Oct 31, 2006, John Labovitz wrote: > I don't want to make this a TextDrive flame war... No, actually I do, > but I'll refrain.
Awww, and here I was hoping we could team up and dissuade everyone from using TxD. Oh well, I'll try to be good. > - Don't assume you can run non-production environments. TxD doesn't > want you to do debugging on their servers, so changing RAILS_ENV may > not be okay. This is probably a reasonable thing for any shared host. Be a nice guy and run in production on your production servers. > - Expect your long-lived dispatch.fcgi processes to be killed at > random. This is part of their acceptable-use policy, whereby you > can't use more than some percentage of CPU time, but they don't do a > good job telling you much about it. You'll probably find this when > you wonder why your site has gone down. (And don't set up a cronjob > that will watch your lighttpd and restart it; that'll get you bitch- > slapped.) In my case, the bitchslapping was someone at TxD going in and editing my crontab without notifying me in any way. That was not a very pleasant surprise, particularly since I hadn't actually seen the blog post(!) where they announced their Grand Scheme. > - There are a *lot* more than "a few dozen user domains" on each TxD > server. I was going to point this out as well :) > - Once you've set up a domain using webmin, don't go messing with > them via ssh (except for the actual web content). For example, when > you cancel your TxD account, don't delete the directories by hand, or > you'll cause the main Apache config to be busted. Personally, I'd say go ahead and delete your directories. It's not your fault their apache config is so fragile ;) Seriously, though, the best way to run at TxD is to have them proxy all of your requests to your own lighty... then it's really hard to hose the apache config, because you're not using it at all. When I was there, I had them move my svn to svn.bleything.net, and then proxy everything that wasn't that subdomain. Worked like a champ. The downside, of course, is that you need to know a little bit about running web servers, and not everyone cares to. > - Read the forums, especially when you're trying debug some > problem. Many important system changes are not documented on TxD's > blog or support pages, and certainly not by email directly to the > customer. This is totally annoying, but true. Yet another reason I decided it was time to move on. The bottom line is that most shared hosting sucks in one way or another, you just need to find the one that sucks least, and in ways you can bear. Ben _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
