Alex Pooley's Blog

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So far so good with the new hosting at ev1servers. I ditched “Apache”:http://httpd.apache.org/ and “fastcgi”:http://fastcgi.com in favour of “pound”:http://www.apsis.ch/pound/ and “mongrel”http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/.

I experienced issues with the apache/fastcgi combination at both dreamhost and site5. Issues that translated in to significant down time. Down time is just not acceptable for a web application so I had to find a better way.

It turns out that all the cool kids are using mongrel as a “runner” instead of other solutions such as cgi, scgi, fastcgi. The idea is that you create a cluster/pool of mongrels that essentially contain your ruby application and proxy HTTP requests that arrive at the box to the cluster. It’s a really nice, fast, and best of all, simple solution.

So what’s the go with msgpad now? Well, It’s maturing. Once I can verify that the hosting migration has succeeded, I will invite more beta testers. I’m mindful of the perpetual beta and rest assured, I am cautiously but surely navigating my way through :)

Interesting point of note: while reading about my webserver/runner options on the web I came across “rimuhosting”:http://rimuhosting.com. It’s apparantly the host of choice for quite a few.