Robby on Rails: Tag hosting

Announcing Cobalt and monthly subscriptions for Boxcar

Robby Russell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:24:00 -0500

We’ve been designing and developing a new centralized billing platform over the past few months and late last week, we launched it! Along with this new billing platform, we launched another new application, Cobalt, which is a new account management and support tool for our hosting customers.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

We’ll be migrating all of our past customers over to this new system in time, but are initially using it for new Boxcar customers.

We’ve been building the new system to use Braintree as our new credit card payment gateway. With this switch, we’re also introducing monthly subscription rates for Boxcar, which means that you can try it out month-to-month now.

Over the next few weeks/months, we’ll be announcing several features to Cobalt that will ease your Rails deployment experience.

I want to thank all those on my team that helped get these new applications up and running.

If you’re looking for professional VPS-based Rails hosting, hop on our train by ordering a Boxcar today for $99/month!

For more information, visit railsboxcar.com or Planet Argon.

Also, be sure to follow Boxcar on twitter.

Deploying Rails with an interactive Capistrano recipe to your Boxcar

Robby Russell — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:27:00 -0600

I wanted to share something that I’ve been meaning to share on here.

When we began planning Rails Boxcar, we really want to reduce the amount of work that it took to setup and deploy a VPS for a Rails application. During this period, we began to look at the deployment process itself and began working on an interactive tool for developers for setting up their deployment environment on their Boxcar instances. So, we worked with few customers to develop an interactive Capistrano recipe.

The Goal? Spend less time configuring the server or editing recipe files.

During the initial setup, we can have the customer provide a few details from the safety of their Rails application directory by answering the following.

What database server will you be using? (PostgreSQL or MySQL)
What port does your database run on? (if different than the default for your db server)
What is your database username?
What is your database user’s password?
What port will your mongrel cluster start with?
How many mongrel servers should your cluster run?

Great… setup the server and let’s deploy!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Feel free to snag our interactive Capistrano2 recipe.

We’re trying to take the pain out of deploying your Ruby on Rails applications with Boxcar.

On a side note, we’re in the process of expanding our team and recently hired Alex Malinovich. Do stay tuned as we’ll be posting important announcements about changes to our Rails hosting services in the next few weeks. (grin)

Boxcar: Open for business

Robby Russell — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 13:04:00 -0500

We’ve been quietly rolling out our new Rails hosting solution over the past month, each week… inviting more people to ask questions and place orders. Initially, we invited some of our business hosting customers, and then sent out invites to those who signed up on the Rails Boxcar announcement list. We’ve been taking orders for the past few weeks and have had sites running on Boxcar for over a month now.

You’ll also notice that we’ve begun to phase out all of our older shared hosting solutions for new customers and are focusing solely on our Business and Boxcar accounts (aside from custom managed/dedicated solutions that we’ve been offering upon request).

To learn more about Rails Boxcar, read the announcement on the PLANET ARGON blog.

In other news, Daniel Johnson, our Lead Systems Administrator broke his arm while riding his bike while participating in Zoo Bomb (and cracked his helmet in the process). He’s at home today on pain medicine and we hope that he has a swift recovery.

YSlow and Rails performance: Getting UJS and AssetPackager to play nice

Robby Russell — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 13:40:00 -0500

Yesterday, I started to dig deeper into YSlow and decided to pick an application that we recently launched for a client. The performance grade that I saw at first was an F, which wasn’t surprising to me because we knew that there was going to be some fine tuning in the near future.

There is a lot of JavaScript in this application and we have several files to break up stuff to make it more maintainable. However, in production, we really don’t need to send the client (browser) 19 different JS files. We’ve been using mod_deflate to compress these files, but it doesn’t solve the problem of having several connections opening to download all the necessary JavaScript. The same is true for our CSS files.

At RailsConf, DHH announced that an upcoming version of Rails would bundle all the stylesheet and javascript files into one file and compress it. We’re running on 1.2.x for this application and decided to look at the AssetPackager plugin as a good solution to this problem.

I installed the plugin via piston and ran the following task, which is provided by AssetPackager.

rake asset:packager:create_yml

This went ahead and created config/assets_packager.yml. I then went ahead and updated our capistrano configuration to call the rake task after updating the code on the server when deploying.


desc "all of our other tasks/commands to run after updating the code" 
task :after_update_code do
  #
  # all of our other tasks/commands
  #
  run "cd #{release_path} && rake RAILS_ENV=production asset:packager:build_all" 
end

The first thing that I noticed was that the yml file that gets generated will not make any assumption as to what order the javascript libraries should be loaded. So, immediately, line 1 of our compressed javascript file was causing an error as the code was trying to reference a library that hadn’t been defined yet (showed up later in the file). So, when you do this, you’ll need to organize the yml file to load things in order that they are needed. This was also a good opportunity for us to say, “oh, we’re not using that one anymore. Let’s remove it.”


--- 
javascripts: 
- base: 
  - prototype  
  - effects
  - scriptaculous
  - controls
  - dragdrop
  - application
  - slider
  - pngfix
  - nav
  - lowpro
  - lightbox
  - folder
  - builder

Great, so we re-dployed and everything at first glance seemed fine… or so we thought!

We used the unobtrusive javascript plugin for this project and it seems that we couldn’t just compress every single file. Each page has a behaviors javascript file and since everything was being compressed into one file (and cached), RJS calls quickly broke throughout the site. OH NO!

So, I opted to merge all of the other javascript files and use the standard way of including unobtrusive javascript in the application layout.


<%= javascript_include_merged :base %>
<%= javascript_include_tag :unobtrusive %>

We also removed lowpro from the list of javascript files to compress since the ujs plugin is currently including this when we call <%= javascript_include_tag :unobtrusive %>. I plan to look into modifying this so we it’ll only include the page-specific behaviors and not load the lowpro javascript file (so we can compress that as well).

Once this was re-deployed, we saw that the RJS issues were resolved and everything felt to be loading quicker. But, let’s look at YSlow again for step 1 in improving the performance of the application.

side note: the following grading was also after making some other adjustments that were suggested by YSlow, which I’ll discuss in another blog post soon.

So, where we once had a grade F, we now have an D… which is due to the client having us add several (four) external javascript files for mint, google analytics, etc. We’re only loading 3 javascript files for the application, when we were originally loading many more.

Obviously, there is some more tuning to be done, but we went from a grading of 43 to 74 in about three hours of time spent reading the YSlow documentation, adding asset_packager, and making various tweaks to our web servers (as suggested by YSlow).

Until next time…

Every Second Counts with a Piston in your Trunk

Introducing Boxcar... coming soon to a train station near you!

Robby Russell — Tue, 08 May 2007 15:35:00 -0500

As I just announced on the PLANET ARGON blog... our new hosting solution is almost here!

Last month, we put a freeze on new orders on several of our Rails hosting packages so that we could do some remodeling. Well, we’re almost done and excited about what we’re going to be reopening with. :-)

We’ll be posting updates on the PLANET ARGON blog over the coming days/weeks… so yo might consider subscribing to our feed.

Be sure to sign up on our mailing list to be amongst the first to be notified when Boxcar gets launched!

quote of the day: server tricks

Robby Russell — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:03:00 -0600

...overheard on an internal forum…

“My my passion for nifty server tricks will blow peoples minds”—Daniel Johnson

Goodbye Instiki, Hello JunebugWiki

Robby Russell — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 10:46:00 -0600

If you’ve spent much time on the Ruby on Rails wiki, you know that the spam situation smells like rotten fruit.

We’ve been using Instiki, the same software as the Rails wiki for the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project and the spam situation was becoming an annoyance. So, we’ve switched to JunebugWiki as step one, to see how it holds up. The default styling was a nice improvement because we haven’t had much chance to update the instiki one. It might not solve all of our spam problems, but in the short term, it appears to be a more elegant solution. It’s also the first application built with camping that I have personally deployed.

So… I present to you… the new PLANET ARGON Documentation Project.

In other news, it appears that RubyURL has caught the eye of spammers, which sucks. I’m still thinking over a few possible ways to try and prevent that. :-/

Remember When?

Robby Russell — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:49:00 -0600

I was looking through some old code from over two years ago, when I was playing with my first Rails applications. I noticed this hidden file in the public/ directory, called .htaccess.

Do you remember the good ‘ole days?


RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /dispatch.cgi?$1 [QSA,L]

I remember when we at PLANET ARGON first starting hosting Ruby on Rails applications (two years ago now!) and we had to continually explain to people that running on FastCGI was going to significantly improve speed over their default CGI deployment. This was one of the first FAQs that we posted on our website.

...oh how we’ve come a long way.

Before you know it, we’ll be on IRC and talking about the good ‘ole Rails days… like we do about the BBS days. ;-)

Do you have a remember when story related to Rails?

Goodbye Pound, Hello Nginx

Robby Russell — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:48:00 -0600

I’ve been using pound for several months and it’s been a good relationship. Except, for some strange reason, I noticed that I was getting development mode errors when it was running in production mode. I thought there might be an issue with my mongrel cluster… but that wasn’t the case.

Let me give you a little background to how we’re encouraging customers to handle their deployment on PLANET ARGON.

Most of our hosting customers¹ have three tiers (unless you have your own static IP address), one which we manage, two that you manage.

We handle the main web server/proxy server and proxy to your desired load balancer/proxy/server, which is generally any of the following options… depending on your preference.

Pound
Lighttpd
Nginx
Apache 2.x or Apache 1.3.x
Mongrel

Each customer has a unique proxy server port and a range of other ports for their mongrel clusters.

So… the typical setup is…

Apache(external:80) [proxies to]==> Pound(localhost:8050) [proxies to]==> Mongrel::Cluster(localhost:10500-10503)

Well, when a request comes in through Apache, it gets passed off to Pound and each tier has it’s own headers. By the time that it reaches Mongrel, all the requests appear to be coming from localhost.. not the remote address of the person using your application. Notice nothing but localhost requests in your production.log? ...this is the reason.

So, what side-effects does this have? Well, aside from every request looking local… Rails will, by default, output a normal development-mode error message if the request is coming from localhost.


    # found in...
    # actionpack/lib/action_controller/rescure.rb

    # Exception handler called when the performance of an action raises an exception.
    def rescue_action(exception)
      log_error(exception) if logger
      erase_results if performed?

      if consider_all_requests_local || local_request?
        rescue_action_locally(exception)
      else
        rescue_action_in_public(exception)
      end
    end

It seems that this currently causes the exception notification plugin, which we often use, to not work. We noticed this in a staging environment for an application that we’re building for a client about a month ago. After debugging SMTP servers, mongrel configuration… I was baffled.

Nginx to the `rescue`

After some investigation and attempts to find a workaround in Pound, I decided to redeploy my blog with Nginx. This was a pretty painless process and I was able to use the example posted on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project.

Nginx allows you to do the following to overwrite the headers being passed to Mongrel.


    proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

Problem Solved!

If there is a workaround for this in Pound, I’d love to be able to relay this information to our customers that haven’t made the switch yet.

Thank you, Brian and Timothy for encouraging me to finally switch my blog to Nginx. ;-)

If you have questions related to deploying Rails applications, be sure to check out the Rails Deployment google group.

¹ For more information about our hosting, visit http://planetargon.com/hosting.html.

Let's not forget the little people

Robby Russell — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:27:00 -0600

Yesterday, I announced the new Ruby on Rails Deployment group, which has attracted over 200 people and boasts over 50 messages in just the first 24 hours of it’s life.

While this is a greater turnout than I expected… I made a huge mistake yesterday. I forgot to invite the man behind the cutrain.


14:25 < zedas> robbyonrails: rubyonrails-deployment and i wasn't invited?
14:26 < zedas> i think i need to revoke some licenses. :-)
...
14:26 < jarkko> sounds robby just lost his mudcrap belt

I forgot to invite… Zed Shaw.

Zed,
I know that I’ve only met you briefly, but I feel like I’ve known you for years. With each and every mongrel I install, configure, and start… you’re always… right there… with me. This love goes deep.

Please forgive me for not inviting you to the show. I’ve asked the person sitting in the first row to move back a few rows to an empty seat… so you can sit here… right here… with me.

Please accept this letter and invite as an apology.
Robby

For everyone else, we have a few seats available near the back of the room, which you can reserve here. ...but before you do, be sure to recommend his work. [1]

¹ king of the world

Announcement: New Ruby on Rails Deployment Group

Robby Russell — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:52:00 -0600

Our team is working on a new hosting solution¹ for Rails applications. Throughout this process, we’ve been reviewing all the various methods that our team and customers have been using to deploy and host applications written with Ruby on Rails. Our team has been able to closely watch the technologies change on our servers for almost two full years to accommodate the latest in deployment solutions.

Recently, a few deployment savvy customers of ours and us decided that it was time to take some of our experiences and conversations out into the public. We’d like to invite all of you that are interested in Rails deployment to join the new Deploying Rails google group. Whether you’re trying to setup a staging server, deploy to a shared solution like we offer at PLANET ARGON, managing your own VPS, or configuring a cluster of servers for your big launch, we’d love to talk with you about this stuff.

I’m secretly hoping that all the talented Rails deployment experts, like our friends at Rails Machine and Engine Yard, will join us in our effort. :-)

If you’re still hosting your Rails application on Apache and FCGI in a shared environment, this list is for you! ;-)

Join the group today!

UPDATE Zed Shaw has entered the building…

¹ Stay tuned in early February… ;-)

New Years Restorations

Robby Russell — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 03:32:00 -0600

Finally, a break from a hectic week at the office. I spent most of my week working on some servers and outlining some of our plans for where we will be taking the hosting side of our business during the first quarter of 2007. Let’s just say, we’re a few months behind schedule and it’s time to get onboard before the train takes off. ;-)

Have a safe and exciting New Years!

Rails Hosting for the New Year

Robby Russell — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0600

Where have I been the past month?

In a nutshell… I’ve been working, writing, and trying to start a new music project¹.

It’s almost the end of year and things have been extremely busy at PLANET ARGON. You might notice some new names on our site as we have been doing some growing. I’ll announce those individuals at a later point in time… but a quick peak at our Flickr page should give you some insight. :-)

Earlier today, we announced that we’ll be having a special deal on our Rails hosting from now until the end of 2006.

If you’re looking for a good platform to host your Rails applications, we currently recommend the following configuration.

Mongrel Cluster (at least 2 mongrel instances)
Pound as a load balancer/proxy (Nginx is also available for all customers!)
Capistrano for automatic deployment

These are offered on both our shared and business Rails hosting plans. We’ve also been revamping our technical support options the past month, so take a moment to review our current support options.

We’re looking forward to 2007! In two months, it’ll be two full years since we first announced support for Rails hosting!

¹ For the record, H.O.T was a silly project from several years ago… check our our holiday ep!

Ruby on Rails hosting with Nginx

Robby Russell — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:33:00 -0600

Let me just say… that our customers are awesome.

One of our favorite customers, Timothy Bennett, has posted some documentation for running Nginx on your PLANET ARGON hosting account. If you’re already playing with mongrel, lighttpd, and pound…. you might look at Nginx.

“Nginx is a proxy/load-balancer that also is able to serve static files (and is a good deal faster at it than mongrel). It’s more complicated to setup than pound, but results in a faster setup.”

Stop by our new online forums (powered by Beast) and/or our IRC Channel to meet some of our great customers!

Rails Hosting with Resource Limits

Robby Russell — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:33:00 -0500

Over the past several weeks, David and Daniel have been working to make our Ruby on Rails hosting options even more streamlined. We’ve been aiming to implement new resource limits on all of our servers.

For example, did you know that when you purchase a Business Level 1 account with us (starting at only $75/month), you’re getting 196 MB of resident memory and 368 MB of virtual memory? The great part about this? You don’t have to configure and manage the server yourself… we do it for you!

If you’re shopping for some hosting… you might take a quick peak at our Rails Business Hosting packages.

..and yes, our standard hosting plans have resource limits too! We hope this will cut down on the noise that you hear from your neighbors.

Luigi has a secret

Robby Russell — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:02:00 -0500

I’m in New York City this week working with one of our clients… and a little birdie told me that the PLANET ARGON team in Portland is preparing a formal announcement in the coming week(s)...

..the informal announcement?

Dedicated servers for hosting your Rails applications! ...yeah it’s about time. ;-)

Rails and Mongrel go to the Pound

Robby Russell — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 19:35:00 -0500

We’ve been encouraging our Rails hosting customers to give Pound and Mongrel a try for deploying their Ruby on Rails applications. David Gibbons has been adding some recipes for doing this on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project

Check out:

...and today David posted an article on his blog titled, Why you need multiple mongrel instances with rails!

The Rails birthday party isn't over!

Robby Russell — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:47:00 -0500

Ruby on Rails is two years old now and we’ve been hosting Rails applications for over a year and a half now!

To mark this occasion, if you sign up with one of our Shared Rails Hosting plans by Friday, August 11th, we’ll give you an extra month of hosting for free!

Our hosting plans start as low as $11.25/month!

If you’re looking for a great place to deploy your Rails application with some of the cutting edge deployment options (mongrel, pound, lighttpd, capistrano, etc…) take a look at the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project to learn more.

When signing up for your new account, use the following coupon code: RAILS.IS.2.YEARS.OLD!

To learn more about our hosting options, visit http://www.planetargon.com/hosting.html or visit us in our chat room.

New Hires at PLANET ARGON

Robby Russell — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:03:00 -0500

Quick update on what’s going on at PLANET ARGON. Starting today, we are adding two more talented individuals to our Core Team. Neither of them are active bloggers yet, but if you want to meet them… you can stop by our IRC channel and say hi!

I would like to introduce Daniel Johnson, who will be joining the Rails Hosting and support side of the business. I’ve personally known him for a few years as a member of PDXLUG, a Portland Linux User Group that I helped start almost four years ago. You might keep an eye on his blog over the next few weeks… :-)

Jumping into the Rails development arena here at PLANET ARGON is Andrew Grim, who has been one of our satellite developers (contractors) for the past month. We liked him so much that we just had to offer him a full-time position.

...and if you’re considering moving to beautiful Portland, Oregon, we’re still looking for a few more people. ;-)

RailsConf, day 1

Robby Russell — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:22:00 -0500

Rails and Database Schemas

This morning, David Thomas opened up the conference by pointing out three problems that Rails needs to solve. The one that hit home for me and my love of databases… especially monolithic legacy ones… was his first bullet, “Data Integration.” Natural keys, composites, automatic AR relationships with reflection, and non-database backends. He didn’t mention stored procedures… I’ll have to ask him about that. ;-)

Shared Hosting and Rails

I’m currently sitting in Topfunky’s talk, “Rails Deployment on Shared Hosting”. He had a few funny slides… yes… deployment on shared hosting can be painful. We’ve been working with our customers to ease this problem as much as possible by collaborating on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project. He also suggested that people consider a VPS, which is a very viable option… if you have the time and patience to setup the server. The pains of regular shared hosting are a big concern especially if you have a mission critical business application. This is why we moved towards our Rails Business Hosting plans and are working out the details for yet another step above in terms of cost and reliability. Stay tuned for more details…

I’ll post more notes later…

Rails Business Hosting Encourages Weekend Getaways

Robby Russell — Sun, 28 May 2006 12:34:00 -0500

Wow, it’s only been two weeks since the PLANET ARGON team announced our new suite of Rails Business Hosting plans and the response has been great! Some of our existing customers are taking advantage of this and upgrading their accounts and moving to the new exclusive resort of Rails hosting.

A few people have asked some important questions about our new Rails Business Hosting plans.

Can I use it as a reseller account?
- No, this suite of plans is targeted towards businesses who need a more isolated environment for hosting their new web application running on Ruby on Rails! This would violate our 10-15 customers per server arrangement.
How is this better than my own VPS?
- We’ll admit, a VPS is a nice option and would be a competitor to our new plans. However, one key difference is that we manage the server for you. Not all developers are also Unix system administrators. We’ve been hosting Rails applications for well over a year and understand the complexities that surround deployment and hosting them and leverage this experience when we architect our hosting environments.
Do you have documentation for your new plans?
- Yes! We’re modeling our environment to be very similar to our standard rails hosting plans, so the information being collected on the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project is accurate. This also makes it easy for you to move from one of your current accounts to the new service as only a few variables will change.

How many of you have taken a long vacation and not needed to worry about your servers and applications staying up? We’re hoping to help you take that cruise, those three weeks on a tropical island, or the rafting trip your friends keep talking about.

We’re here so you don’t have to be!

Learn more about out Rails Business Hosting plans.

PLANET ARGON Monthly Newsletter, May 10, 2006

Robby Russell — Sun, 14 May 2006 08:56:00 -0500

(copy/pasted from email)

New Business Level Rails Hosting Plans
New Rails Application Audit Service
Jeremy Signs Book Deal with O’Reilly
Robby and Jeremy speak at Canada on Rails
Ruby on Rails Podcast features PLANET ARGON
Project Borat
New Face at PLANET ARGON
New PLANET ARGON Documentation Project
Upcoming Events

New Business Level Rails Hosting Plans Launched

As a PLANET ARGON newsletter subscriber you are one of the first to hear about our new suite of business class hosting plans. Are you are seeking a cost effective solution for hosting your business critical Rails application, but aren’t ready for a dedicated server? Our Rails Business Hosting plans are just what you are looking for! More bandwidth, more disk space, more ram and fewer neighbors. Forget about the perils of sharing a server with a couple hundred users. The Rails Business Hosting plans limit the number of users on a server to no more than 15.

“All of the service and support of a shared server,” says David Gibbons, PLANET ARGON’s Lead Systems Administrator. “You’ll never have to worry about the headaches of server administration, but you still reap the benefits from being one of a select few having to share resources.”

For more information on the Rails Business Hosting plans, please visit: http://www.planetargon.com/rails_business_hosting.html

New Rails Audit Service

PLANET ARGON has a new service for businesses building web applications with Ruby on Rails: A $2500, 48 hour turn-around code audit and analysis.

“We built this service specifically for businesses wanting expert advice on how to improve and optimize their Rails applications,” says Peat Bakke, the Project Director at PLANET ARGON. “A little guidance makes a big difference, especially with development teams who are new to Rails.”

The audit provides recommendations tailored to your Rails application that might include optimizing database interactions, improving test coverage, simplifying AJAX interactions, automation with Rake, RESTful behaviors, and plugins.

For more information on our new audit service, contact us today: http://www.planetargon.com/contact.html

Jeremy Signs Book Deal with O’Reilly

We are very excited to announce that Jeremy Voorhis, PLANET ARGON’s very own Lead Architect, has signed a deal with leading technical book publisher, O’Reilly Media. Jeremy will be writing Rails in a Nutshell, part of the popular Nutshell series. This means that PLANET ARGON has not one, but two authors writing books about Ruby on Rails! Congratulations Jeremy!

For more information and to sign up for email updates, visit: http://www.railsinanutshell.com/

Robby and Jeremy speak at Canada on Rails

Where were Robby and Jeremy on April 14? They were both speaking at the Canada on Rails conference in Vancouver, BC. Robby presented Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System, and Jeremy talked about Globalizing Rails.

Robby shared his insight about bending ActiveRecord’s conventions to work with a legacy database and gave a live demonstration of how this could be done with Dell’s freely available video store database. Check out the presentation slides for Sneaking Rails through the (Legacy) System at http://rubyurl.com/DRv

Jeremy shared his experiences from developing and using the Globalize plugin to internationalize Rails applications. This covers the Globalize basics as well as tips and tricks for designing your application. View the presentation for Internationalizing Rails at http://rubyurl.com/1WQ

PLANET ARGON currently has a site in production that supports 18 languages and is fully translatable through the web. PLANET ARGON is also the hosting sponsor of the Globalize project, which can be found at http://www.globalize-rails.org/.

For those of you who were unable to join us in Vancouver, Robby has collected informative links from Canada on Rails including many of the speakers’ slides. Check it out at: http://rubyurl.com/gZG

Even better, you can hear more from both Robby and Jeremy at RailsConf in Chicago this June.

Ruby on Rails Podcast features PLANET ARGON

Be sure to check out one of the latest Ruby on Rails Podcasts recorded in Vancouver, BC at the Canada on Rails conference earlier in April. Jeremy Voorhis and Robby Russell, both speakers at the event, had a chance to sit down with Geoffrey Grosenbach to discuss PLANET ARGON development practices, projects, deployment, books, and our involvement in the the Rails community.

Listen now! http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/

Project Borat

Project Borat is a top secret development project here at PLANET ARGON. It’s a big project with high expectations, a fairly tight delivery schedule, an open ended feature set, and flexible priorities. The Client has extensive startup experience, expertise in the target market and some rather good ideas.

What is it? We can’t tell you. Who’s The Client? We can’t say. What does it do? Sorry. When will we see it? Nope.

How are you building it? Ahh .. yes. That’s something we will enthusiastically blog about in the months to come.

Check out Robby’s first installment at: http://rubyurl.com/BqJ

PLANET ARGON Documentation Project

David Gibbons, PLANET ARGON’s resident Systems Administrator, recently launched a new website for the PLANET ARGON hosting community, which hopes to bring together the PLANET ARGON staff and customers to develop some first class documentation for managing your hosting account at PLANET ARGON. Tutorials ranging from installing PostgreSQL to using Capistrano with PLANET ARGON have been created and maintained by many of our customers. We encourage all our existing customers to stop by and see how you can help out and hopefully you’ll learn a few tricks!

A big thank you goes out to the PLANET ARGON customers who have helped seed the project and to those of you who will continue to build upon it.

Visit the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project: http://docs.planetargon.com/

New Face at PLANET ARGON

The demand for Ruby on Rails development is growing, and PLANET ARGON is growing to meet the demand! Meet Brian Ford, the newest addition to our development team. He’s not on our about page yet, but in the meantime you can check out his blog at (http://blog.brightredglow.com/).

Upcoming Events

Argon Express, June 19-21—Portland, OR to Chicago, IL [http://www.theargonexpress.com]
RailsConf 2006, June 22-25—Chicago, IL [http://www.railsconf.com]

Until next time—

The PLANET ARGON Core Team

Robby, Allison, Jeremy, David, Jason, Peat, and Brian

Rails Business Hosting Gets a Holiday

Robby Russell — Thu, 11 May 2006 17:31:00 -0500

We’ve finally let the cat out of the bag. We’ve been testing out things for the past few months and a public announcement is long over due. PLANET ARGON has just announced our new Rails Business Hosting packages, which start from as low as $75/month.

How does this service differ from our existing Rails hosting? Well, your accounts are placed on special island servers… and there are very few neighbors. Think about it. Standard shared hosting is like going downtown and there is traffic everywhere. Cars, street construction, help vampires... you know what I’m talking about. It works out for some people, but it can also be stressful for both you and your customers.

This is why PLANET ARGON has been working on a building better solution for those who are seeking a more relaxing and less noisy hosting environment. We’ve been hosting Rails applications for over a year… and we’re proud to have been one of the first providers in the community. Our team has learned much about Rails…heck, two of us are writing books on the subject and as a development firm who also has to deploy Rails applications for our clients, we know first hand the difficulties that are associated with deploying your application in a shared environment.

It’s probably safe for us to say, “we’ve helped deploy more Rails apps than you have.” ;-)

Our new Rails Business Hosting plans aim to provide better performance, uptime, scaling options, security, and deployment support. This solution is perfect for those who are launching their new Rails applications but don’t have the budget to purchase their own servers or the technical knowhow to administer a VPS. Let us do it for you and hopefully this will let you get back to doing what you do best—managing your business and building the next iteration of your product.

“All of the service and support of a shared server,” says David Gibbons, PLANET ARGON’s Lead Systems Administrator. “You’ll never have to worry about the headaches of server administration, but you still reap the benefits from being one of a select few having to share resources.”

Learn more about our Rails Business Hosting plans!

PLANET ARGON - Documentation Project, part 2

Robby Russell — Thu, 04 May 2006 18:56:00 -0500

Let me start off by saying that our customers are awesome. That’s right. They are awesome.

A while back, I announced the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project and since then our documentation has gone through several changes and it’s being driven by several of our hosting customers.

As of today, all PLANET ARGON hosting customers will notice this when they login to their control panel.

For more information about hour rails hosting, visit www.planetargon.com.

For more information about our documentation project, visit docs.planetagon.com.

Lighttpd, crontab, and server reboots

Robby Russell — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 19:41:00 -0600

I’ll be the first to admit that server reboots do happen. Whether they are for planned hardware upgrades or the unexpected runaway CPU processes…they can cause some problems for your applications.

Recently, we had an unexpected outage on one of our servers and noticed that some of the lighttpd instances were not restarted automatically. I personally went and started up each one manuually and documented who they all were. We wanted to build a nice solution to this… but because every user has their own method of invoking lighttpd and we kind of let you run free with that… the idea to build one init script to meet everyones needs… isn’t currently practical. We want you to have some freedom with that and we can help you along the way. :-)

So… what should you do?

Well, David Gibbons (our new Lead Systems Administrator) has a nice tip on his blog, a cool trick with cron.

He shows you how to use the @reboot option in crontab for scheduling scripts to startup on a reboot.

This is great to use and should work if you are a hosting customer at PLANET ARGON. Expect more little tricks like this in the future as David has many up his sleeve. You might want to subscribe to his brand new Typo blog RSS feed. ;-)

class David < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :tricks
end

Have a great weekend!

PostgreSQL 8.1 was released!

Robby Russell — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 18:21:00 -0600

Just a quick announcemnet:

Yesterday, the PostgreSQL team released version 8.1. Take a peak at the latest changes and enhancements.

Yes, we’re offering PostgreSQL 8.1 Hosting and Support for it now at PLANET ARGON. :-)

PLANET ARGON 2.0 Release Candidate

Robby Russell — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 13:10:00 -0500

We finally found a way to sneak in some extra time to finish up the first phase of our new website. Allison and I are excited to announce the launch of new PLANET ARGON website, www.planetargon.com.

What Powers It?

Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL!

What Has Changed?

For starters, we have a new design. Hopefully the information that you are seeking is easier to navigate to and the order process is a bit easier too. Aside from that, we’ve made just minor changes to our hosting offerings to reflect the needs of our customers. I’ll touch on that shortly.

ReEmphasize The Small Stuff

We first started offering Rails hosting to the public at the beginning of February. In just a week we’ll have nine full months of experience under our belts. Our customers have been a huge influence on the type of services we offer, and the level of support that comes with it. It was out of my own desire to have a web host that allowed for bleeding-edge technology that lead me to start my own hosting company… so that I could turn around and offer other developers, like myself, the same service, without the time commitment of managing your own server and the price tag that goes along with it.

Our Customers are Awesome!

No really, they are. We recently setup an RSS aggregator of some of our hosting customers that run blogs (many of them are running Typo). We call this site, Inhabitants of PLANET ARGON. (inhabitants.planetargon.com) Check it out!

More Space!

We’ve spent some time really looking over our hosting plans and wanted to give them a make-over that reflects the requests of our customers and potential customers. We’ve increased the disk space on the first three of our shared-hosting plans, and lowered the price on the fourth. Take a peek.

Some of our prices have gone up (with the increase in disk space), but our Level 1 plan still starts as low as $11.25/month. This can get you rolling on Rails using PostgreSQL and/or MySQL! :-)

Typo Hosting

We started offering affordable blog hosting last year. Then Typo took off, and none of the other blog software packages were being requested! We have dropped all the PHP blogging applications from our offerings and are now offering Typo Hosting exclusively. For $3/month, you can have your own pre-installed Typo blog!

FREE RAILS HOSTING!

Well, sort of. If you sign up by midnight (PST) on October 31st, you will receive 1 FREE Month for every 6 month account and 2* FREE Months* for every year! (Blogs too)

We’re Not Just a Hosting Company

PLANET ARGON was started as a web development and consulting company, and it still is!

Who Is Allison?

Allison is the Creative Director here at PLANET ARGON. Existing customers of ours know about her… but she’s kept a low profile up until now. She is a ninja in the ways of project management, clean design, and has been known to have a tab open in her browser to the Ruby on Rails API. Expect to hear more from (and about) her in the near future.

For more information, see: http://www.planetargon.com

Typo Theme Contest announced

Robby Russell — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 12:33:00 -0500

Geoffrey Grosenbach has announced the Typo Theme Contest on TypoGarden.org, Yay!

PLANET ARGON has offered a year of Level 3 hosting for the winner. We also promised ten free blog hosting packages to the first ten people that submit new themes that meet the requirements of the content!

Good luck to all the players. :-)

(obviously… I could use a new theme too… I might have to participate!)