Monday 29 September 2008

ec2onrails

This is so great - goodbye other hosting companies that can't compete!

Amazon has hosting facilities known as ec2 (elastic compute cloud). You pay by the hour ($.10 for a small installation). That works out to around $70/month. But, the power you get is much better than your average hosting.

Paul Dowman has released a great ec2 instance called ec2onrails that can get your rails app up and running on ec2 in about 30 minutes. I am now using it for FilmAmora as well as for another client.

It is awesome!

One thing I discovered today was the sweet built-in support for cron jobs. Write a script and plop it in your app's script directory. Call it hourly, daily or weekly (perhaps monthly? I didn't check). This script will get run automatically by an already existing cron job! No need to figure out those silly cron settings. Very cool!

I highly recommend it. FilmAmora is running much much better on it than on the old hosting (where I had to restart it every day just to hopefully have enough memory to run 2 mongrels).