Ruby Hosting (with Rails)

Question

Many people have asked about Rails hosting on this site, but I am not well acquainted with what you need to know if there is a difference.

I want to host some Ruby CGI web services, basically just ruby ​​methods that take parameters from a POST request, access MySQL db and return data.

I looked at RoR, and it seems unnecessary because of this, from what I can say, to speed up the development of baesd data from CRUD sites, which is not at all what I am doing.

So my question is: does this affect the hosting provider that I choose? Does anyone recommend good Ruby hosting for CGI operations? I am not familiar with FastCGI, mod_ruby, Passenger, Mongrel, etc., and what they mean for performance, scalability, etc. I just want to place my ruby ​​scripts with fairly good performance, and all the information there (and here) seems to be rail oriented.

Answer 1

First, if you need light weight, Sinatra is usually my first choice. Combine it with rack and Passenger for best results. It's not CGI, but realistically speaking, CGI is rarely a good match with Ruby.

Here is "Hello World!" Sinatra app from the home page:

require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/hi' do "Hello World!" end 

It is hard to get lighter weight.

As for providers, anyone who supports Passenger (mod_rack) should be able to handle Sinatra. I am a big fan of Slicehost personally, but it is a VPS host, which means that you need to be able to install and manage the entire stack. If you don't mind paying a bit for infrastructure, Heroku makes installation and deployment dead easy if your needs don't exceed what they provide (sounds like they won’t). In the unlikely event that you use only 5 MB, or if you use an external storage engine such as Amazon RDS , Heroku may actually be free for you.

Update:

• Passenger is an Apache module that allows you to run Rack applications inside Apache.
• A rack is a middleware layer that separates the web server and web structure from each other. This allows web frameworks to run on any web server for which there is an adapter.
• Sinatra is a lightweight web environment that runs on top of a rack.

After installing Passenger and Rack ( gem install rack , gem install passenger ), you just need to edit vhost Apache to specify the config.ru file for your Sinatra application and create the necessary directories according to Passenger documents , and you will be well off.

Answer 2

I think you might need to watch Rack . It allows you to do what you are talking about and dismisses the weight of frameworks like Rails or Merb. Rack applications can be placed in a place such as Heroku .