Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

It’s been a little over two months since we switched our Ruby on Rails hosting packages from FastCGI to mod rails (Phusion Passenger), what better time then for a debrief on how the switch went and what we have discovered two months on. I’m sure no one will be surprised to hear mod rails is far superior to FastCGI in pretty much every way.

Firstly the initial switch, for the most part it went very well, nearly all rails applications worked exactly the same under mod rails as they did FastCGI. A very small number of applications had issues, all of which were easy to fix within a few minutes. Overall the switch went very smoothly only requiring an apache rebuild and the mod rails installation.

Initially we started using the 1.x branch of mod rails, with a large number of rails applications running we noticed Apache would locking up periodically and require a manual restart. This issue only occurred on production servers running many rails applications and was not apparent on our test servers. The problem turned out to be fairly wide spread on servers with a lot of traffic. The Phusion Passenger guys were quick to respond to feedback and remedied the problem with a 2.x beta release. Since upgrading to the 2.x branch of mod rails it’s been rock solid!

What benefits have we seen since switching to mod rails hosting?

Firstly, startup time has been greatly reduced. Where as FastCGI needs to load the rails core code as well as the applications code into memory each time it’s started, mod rails keeps the rails core code in memory so only the applications code needs to be loaded. This has reduced rails application start up time from around 5-25 seconds to about 2-10 seconds depending on the size of the application. A huge difference I’m sure you will agree.

Another benefit of mod rails is the reduced memory usage and better process management. When running FastCGI we needed to keep watch for runaway processes using too much memory, spawning too many children or processes that had simple become stuck. Mod rails has none of these issues, in our experience processes are stopped correctly when not in use and memory usage is always within acceptable limits. Mod rails keeps rails applications in check meaning there is little external process management needed.

Our customers are much happier using our mod rails offerings. Deployment is easier, applications are more stable, faster and more responsive, and don’t suffer form any of the FastGCI setup peculiarities. In a nutshell customers can do more themselves without needing to contact us for help or guidance. Customers are also loving the faster application startup time, when running FastCGI we would often get emails from customers asking why their application took so long to load the first time it was requested, since switching we have not had a single email regarding application startup time, it’s simple not an issue any more.

To find out more about our range of mod rails hosting accounts in the UK take a look at our rails package page. Why not take one for a spin? With free setup and our 30 day full refund money back guarantee can you think of a reason not to give us try?

Media72 are very excited to announce we have teamed up with the guys at PeepCode to give away free PeepCode screencasts. Simply signup for one of our Ruby on Rails accounts and receive a PeepCode coupon code entitling you to any screencast absolutely free.

For those that don’t know PeepCode produce very high quality screencasts tutorials for Ruby on Rails developers covering topics from Ruby on Rails basics, rSpec, Git, Merb and much more.

To receive your free screencast sign up for on of our Ruby on Rails accounts hosted on our UK servers.

Over the next week accounts hosted on the bingo.media72.net server will be migrated to new servers in our London data centre, after the migration is completed the bingo server will be decommissioned.

How will this affect you?

For most customers there will be no service interruption, accounts will be migrated and the bingo server will point all traffic to the new server until the DNS has fully propagated.

While we expect the majority of accounts to transfer seamlessly, some accounts with unusual or custom set-ups may not have all of their settings transferred. In this situation you should contact our support desk and we will work with you to get your settings copied to the new server.

Customers who do not use the Media72 DNS servers will need to manually change all DNS entries to point to the new IP address they have been assigned. The main shared IP addresses for the new servers are as follows:

teahupoo.media72.net – 85.13.243.178
shipstern.media72.net – 85.13.243.211

Customers with dedicated IP addresses using their own DNS servers should wait to hear from us before changing any DNS settings.

After your account has been migrated you will need to change any bookmarks such as ftp server, control panel address and mail servers referencing the bingo server directly to point to the new server.

When will this happen?

Accounts will be moved in four stages:

1. Ruby on Rails accounts will be moved to the teahupoo server on Wednesday 9th July
2. Non reseller accounts will be moved to the shipstern server on Thursday 10th July
3. Reseller accounts will be moved to the teahupoo or shipstern servers on Friday 11th July
4. Any accounts with dedicated IP addresses will be moved over the weekend 12th-13th July

If you have any questions or concerns about the migration please contact our support department who will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

After a number of requests the javascript_auto_include plugin now has additional functionality, many people wanted to be able to use the same javascript file in more than one view. It’s now possible to do this by naming files like new-edit.js, you can string as many views together as you like using the “-” character as a delimiter.

Install the plugin using one of the following methods:

script/plugin install http://kernowsoul.com/svn/plugins/javascript_auto_include

Using rails 2.1 and above:

script/plugin install git://github.com/kernow/javascript_auto_include.git

Thank you to all the people who requested this feature.

Greg Pollack from Rails Envy has posted a nice Railsconf in 36 minutes video for all the people that could not make it, like us.

We are pleased to say the bingo server is now fully operational and there are no outstanding issues we are aware of. There was a short downtime cause when our data centre provide rebooted their network without warning and changed some vital settings. We worked with the data centre to resolve this issue quickly.

At this time we are responding to any support tickets as soon as possible and have additional resources available to deal with ay issues you may have.

We will be making an official announcement regarding the recent server outage and future plans in the next few days. We would like to thank all of our customers for their patience and understanding over the last few days.

Media72 Staff

For all customers experiencing DNS update issues we highly recommend using Open DNS, this is a free service and will enable you to view your sites instantly rather than having to wait for your ISP or local network DNS to be updated.

Dear Customers,

We are pleased to say the bingo.media72.net server has now been brought back online. As we were not confident the data centre hosting this server would remain stable we moved the server to an alternative data centre. As a result all IP addresses on the server have changed. This means all domains DNS records needed to be updated, if you are using the Media72 nameservers this will have been done automatically for you and you will not need to take any further action. If you are using your own nameservers you will need to point your domain(s) to the new IP address before it can work. Please change all references of 207.44.185.105 to the new IP address of 74.55.73.72.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this extremely frustrating time.

Media72 Staff