Ruby on Rails hosting
Anchor is dedicated to supporting the latest technologies for web application deployments. Ruby on Rails forms and important part of this offering.
Anchor can do more for you than just host your Ruby applications. Our support engineers are available at any time to assist in configuration, setup and deployment.
Deployment details
Our primary web server of choice (Apache) is configured as a proxy in front of either Mongrel or Lighttpd. You have control over which of the two is used and can switch at any time.
All lifecycle management of both Mongrel and Lighttpd is performed at the user account level. This means you have the capacity to:
- Switch in and out of development mode at any time as required
- Start and stop the webserver
- In lighttpd you have control of the webserver configuration.
By proxying all requests via Apache we gain the flexibility and performance of Lighttpd/Mongrel whilst still maintaining the security and stability of the Apache webserver between your application and the public Internet.
Lighttpd and Mongrel webservers are configured to automatically start after a server reboot via a crontab in each user account.
A generous minimum memory allocation of 40MB is provided per instance.
Application versions
- Ruby: 1.8.4
- Rails: 1.1.6
- MySQL: 4.1.12
- PostgreSQL: 7.4.8
- Apache: 2.0.52
Environment details
Ruby applications can be hosted in both shared and dedicated server environments.
Shared environments utilise:
- High end server grade hardware
- Rackmounted equipment
- Dual CPUs
- ECC Memory (4GB minimum)
- SCSI HDD in RAID1 configuration
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Redundant Hot Swap power supplies
- Fully redundant network infrastructure
- Continuous (24x7) server health monitoring
- Daily offsite tape backups
Account features
- Full shell access via SSH
- Command line database interfaces
- Detailed website statistics updated daily
- Choice of database engine PostgreSQL or MySQL
Application update policy & process
Anchor continuously monitors and applies updates to all applications deployed on Anchor infrastructure to maintain stability and security.
We do not apply major updates to any application which can effect the stability of live/deployed client services.
Automated updates to Ruby are restricted to security patches.
Rails Gems are continuously updated to the latest stable version as they are released.
Rails Gems updates will not however automatically effect deployed Rails applications hosted by Anchor.
Because lifecycle management is controlled at the account level, the version of Rails used in a given deployment can be updated in future by the developer.
Anchor also has the capacity to deploy Rails based on any previous release (back to 0.6.0).
Scalability
As your Ruby application becomes more demanding Anchor can walk you through the process of supplying more resources on the shared environment (eg load balancing requests between multiple Mongrel instances behind apache) or perform a seamless migration to your own dedicated server.
More information
You can download a PDF covering Anchor's ruby on rails hosting service.
