Ok the title sounds a bit funny, but it’s the best I could come up with. Calling all developers, ROR users and people who need and want flexible ruby on rails hosting.
What is your ideal server setup? There are many choices, here are the ones we’d consider.
1) Apache + FastCGI?
2) Apache + Mod_Proxy with Mongrel or another application server?
3) Apache + mod_rails (passenger)
Shell access won’t be a possibility here unfortunately in our new shared hosting system, it’s just not going to be a feature. So what would people like instead? A ruby console of some kind that has limited command line options? What would you like these to be? access to ruby, rake etc?
What about Gems, have the ability to install your own gems? (I can’t see this happening) How about if we had a Gem request system where by you can click a button and stick in a gem name and our support team would get notified?
Many people often ask how do I restart my application? Our current Apache/FastCGI setup results in this question a lot. This requires an apache restart which in cases of busy loads can take the server offline for anything from 2-30 seconds, admittedly this isn’t ideal at all. In an ideal world we’d use passenger (mod_rails). All you have to do to restart your application is put a file called “restart.txt” into the tmp folder of your application and passenger restarts your app, cool huh?
What else would you like? What options would be ideal?