For the most part, I’ve been very happy with the setup. I have apache going into lighttpd with fcgi, and it works pretty well. The subversion hosting is great, and tech support have been very responsive.

On the other hand, for a while now I’ve been receiving regular alerts from montastic, whose server monitoring tools I use, that my sites are down. When I visit the sites, they always seem to be up, so initially I took that as a sign that there was a problem with montastic. But since switching to feedburner for my various feeds, I’ve noticed that they often report problems too, and lately I’ve read more and more reports of regular server reboots at textdrive and of overly strict adherence to processing restrictions.

Word is that there are radical changes coming to textdrive’s shared hosting setup. Since the service is effectively free, and none of the apps I have there are truly mission critical, I’m inclined to stick with them for a while to see what they roll out and whether the service becomes more reliable, but I’m not sure I could recommend them right now.

Like dreamhost, about whom I wrote a few days ago, they use a basic apache/fcgi setup for serving rails applications, but so far it’s felt like processes can be killed a bit more reliably, making deployment a little easier than it is at dreamhost. I’ve not really pushed the servers, but they’ve seemed pretty responsive so far. This is another app which can be fairly heavily cached, so that helps.

There are plenty of instructions floating around for getting set up, which is basically a case of putting your rails app in a new folder on the server and then symlinking your public_html folder to rails’ public folder, and for the most part capistrano works well either from the subversion setup provided or from another.

The one significant issue I ran into ended up taking many hours to resolve, particularly since there wasn’t any log output to help. It turns out that Site5’s configuration is very picky about permissions, and that capistrano’s standard approach to setting permissions conflicts with that, resulting in a lot of dropped requests.

The solution is very simple. Simply override the set_permissions task in your deploy.rb file, to stop capistrano from changing anything.

task :set_permissions, :except => { :no_release => true } do
  # do nothing
end

As I mentioned in my previous entry on hosting (and extended in the comments) apache/fcgi is not my preferred setup, and I’m not likely to choose this setup again. But if you’re happy with it, and particularly if you might want to host PHP sites alongside your rails apps, Site5 seems a solid choice.

Anyone following along with these entries might also like to check out The Host With The Most over at nuby on rails.