While one of the most popular posts on this blog is the instructions I wrote up for compiling and installing Ruby and Rails at 1&1, I never actually got as far as deploying a full application there. I was helping a friend admin that server and hosting a few sites there that we work on together. We’ve got a rails app or two in the works, so I wanted to be ready, but I was never entirely comfortable with the idea of hosting there.
Last week, it became very apparent that we never would deploy an app there. After some problems with their email setup, they appeared to switch off all outgoing email from the PHP apps he had hosted there without notice, and then access to the web sites became patchy, apparently due to an unscheduled change of IP address. After a phone call (in the middle of a week day) in which he was told that the server department was ‘closed’, and then no follow-up within 24 hours, it was decided that all the sites would be migrated over to a mediatemple ‘dedicated virtual’ server, which provides comparable resources, and better access, for roughly the same money.