January 16, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – With the increasing popularity of Ruby on Rails, a website development tool that is famed for reducing development times, web hosting provider Dimension Servers LLC (http://www.dimensionservers.com) has addressed a number of issues related to the hosting of the framework.
According to Dimension Servers, “Ruby on Rails was designed to be human friendly and not designed to be hosting friendly”. A number of hosts utilize FastCGI to facilitate Ruby on Rails and this creates a number of issues. FastCGI causes “load spikes” on Linux servers and Rails using FastCGI and Apache v1.3 or 2.0 suffers from bugs. In addition, many Rails developers do not always know how to use the Linux command line.
The preferred way to provide Ruby on Rails hosting is a load balance Mongrel Cluster. This has proven problematic for hosts because the proxy portion of rails requires the server admin to add/remove lines to the httpd.conf when customers want to add or remove a rails application – particularly difficult for hosts with many Ruby of Rails customers.
To overcome these difficulties Dimension Servers has established an extension to the cPanel control panel that allows end users to control Rails applications. The Rails plug-in automates most rails tasks, speeding deployment. Amongst other features the cPanel plug-in offers base framework installation and initiation, starting and stopping of rails applications, and Rails applications removal.
