Like many others, the first place I hosted a rails application was at textdrive, and I was very pleased to finally find a shared hosting company that respected the fact that I have some understanding of how a server is configured. It’s not that I can’t administer my own server, but I have other priorities and am very happy to pay someone else to do the job better than I could. I leapt at the chance to get a lifetime hosting account, and have a number of sites, including this blog, hosted there.
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.
Tags: lighttpd, ruby on rails, textdrive, web hosting