I learned a few new commands that I haven’t used before:

To find a list of possible locations for a given application (in this case I choose “apt” which isn’t really a binary by itself, but rather a directory name used by “apt-get”.

$ whereis apt
apt: /etc/apt /usr/lib/apt /usr/share/apt /usr/share/man/man8/apt.8.gz

$ whereis apt-get
apt-get: /usr/bin/apt-get /usr/X11R6/bin/apt-get /usr/bin/X11/apt-get /usr/share/man/man8/apt-get.8.gz

Very cool for finding things quickly. If you didn’t catch what the output is, it is a simple space-delimited list of matches following the application name.

I have tried both mongrel and passenger rails hosting on Dreamhost.

Here are some pitfalls I found:

• no clustering (mongrel_cluster not installed)
• one proxy per app
• one mongrel per app
• apache + fastcgi works fine on the shared host plan
• PrivateSersver is 3 times the cost for 1/4 the performance
• your rails environment is *always* production
• they refuse to switch people back to shared.

I have about 30 domains, not a huge amount of traffic, well under “unlimited” … and now I’m paying $30-60/month for what cost me $10 before, nothing much gained from a rails standpoint, because I can’t host multiple environments anyway. The default environment supported for Passenger implementations is “production” — you could override that in the application’s configuration file, but it goes against the principle of easy deployment to any environment.

The disk reports as full at my usage of 6.1 gigs out of my 351 gigs allowed and I’m constantly getting “DISK QUOTA” errors to which they reply — “Naah…check your again.” After repeated emails, they ask what the command was again that caused the error (pasted in original ticket).

I have since started developing a rails app for Link directories on a Slicehost server instead, although the basic package is fairly limited (256mb ram) it handles pretty well with low traffic.

I’ve found I enjoy the hobbyist design as mental stimulation more than I do trying to earn a little extra money on the side.

I have a few sites that I improve periodically through design, and slowly but surely traffic has increased enough to make it worth continued development.

On the job I wear many hats, its nice to focus on just purely design when I’m at home in the evenings…or coding for fun, rather than trying to fit a square peg in a circular hole day after day.