Robby on Rails

Hello from London!

Am currently enjoying the talks at Rails Underground 2009 in London and had the pleasure to be one of the first speakers at the conference. My talk covered a collection of what our team considers best practices. Best practices that aid in the successful launch of a web application and covered a few Rails-specific topics as well.

I’ll be sharing some posts in the coming week(s) that’ll expand on some of these topics as promised to the audience.

Since I covered a wide range of topics, I decided to share my slides online. They won’t provide as much context (as I’m not speaking as you’ll look at them), but they might hint at some of the topics that I covered. There was a guy video taping the talks… so I assume that a video of my talk will be posted online in the near future.

Until then… here are the slides

It’s been over 83,520 minutes since I made the switch from using mongrel as my development environment web server to Phusion Passenger. I’ve been extremely impressed with it. Our team has all switched over and haven’t really hit any obstacles in the transition.

Since some people asked me to let them know how this trial period worked out, I felt it was my duty to encourage you all to try it. You can check out my previous post, Switch to Passenger (mod_rails) in development on OSX in less than 7 minutes or your money back! to get rolling.

Additionally, if you’re looking for a streamlined Ruby on Rails deployment environment that includes Passenger, check out Rails Boxcar.

We recently announced a survey that touched on topics related to the deployment and hosting of Ruby on Rails applications. We promised to share the results with the community and have made this information available at http://rails-hosting.com. You can download the results in CSV, PDF, and view them in HTML here.

Thanks again to everyone who helped us execute this survey!

Alex, Director of Deployment Services, has been hard at work helping us get our new suite of hosting plans out for Rails Boxcar, a deployment environment that we’ve designed to help you get your Ruby on Rails applications running as painless and quickly as possible. With this new announcement, we’ve rebuilt the Boxcar image based on the feedback of our existing customers.

Additionally, we’ve been looking over some of early results from the Ruby on Rails Hosting in 2009 Survey that we’ve been running the past few weeks, which has further boosted our confidence that we’re on the right track with this big change.

What are some of the changes?

• Moving to Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE)
• Moving to Passenger (mod_rails) by default
• All-new pricing structure! (starting at $35/month)

This means that with a Rails Boxcar, you can now get a pre-configured deployment environment using some of the most efficient platforms for hosting your Ruby on Rails applications. (REE has shown to increase performance by 33% in some cases)

We’re really excited about this new setup and would like to invite you all to check out our new plans and send us any questions that you might have.

• Visit RailsBoxcar.com

Wow. Thanks to all of you who have helped get the word out about the Ruby on Rails Hosting 2009 Survey. We just passed 900 people and we have about five more days left to hit the 1500 milestone that I set for myself.

If you can spare five minutes to help us reach this goal, we’d really appreciate it.

Here is a quick sample of the questions that we’re asking the community.

• Where is your source code hosted?
• Which database do you typically use in production?
• which performance monitoring tool do you use?
• How much of your monthly budget is allocated for deployment and hosting expenses?
• So, can Rails scale? ;)

Don’t hesitate… we only have a few days left!

For more information, read the original post, Take the Ruby on Rails Hosting in 2009 Survey.

Thanks to everyone has taken the survey and mentioned it on twitter. We just passed 400 people. We have a ways to go before we hit our goal of at least 1500 people surveyed. (if we can get even more than that… great!)

The survey is taking most people less than 5 minutes to complete, so if you haven’t filled it out yet and have experience deploying Ruby on Rails applications, here’s a link. :-)

Any help that you can provide in getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!