So this has been the month from hell for me as far as hosting with Site5. I thought it was bad trying to figure out how to get a site set up in a Rails 2.2.2 environment. That is nothing compared with dealing with the frustration of a MySQL upgrade while on vacation and an upgrade to Rails 2.2.2 while over seas.
In both cases, the internet access is limited and I only have a small amount of time each day to dedicate to working on the sites I manage. I would love to actually be upgrading the sites and not dealing with the fixes caused by the hosting company.
I think the worst part of all of this is that Site5 didn’t send a notification (may have posted it in the forums, I don’t know, but who checks the forums every day) to let me know that the upgrades were happening. I was scrambling to find out what was going on.
Here are a few things I ran into.
MySQL – The storage engine hung the database some how during the upgrade. This did not happen for the one PHP site I have on the server. I submitted a ticket and they were able to restore from a back up. I had two rails sites that this issue affected.
Upgrade to Rails 2.2.2 – This upgrade would have worked great if I was not using the RMagick gem. It is a great thing that I have about 5 different sites with 5 different configurations. Some sites worked and some did not.
With the first ticket I submitted it was assumed that my site was not compatible with the upgrade and I was told to freeze my gems. This didn’t make sense as I had 2 other sites that went through the upgrade just fine. After digging deeper, I noticed that my RMagick was hosing the site. So I submitted another ticket suggesting that RMagick and the gem for RMagick were out of sync. It was nice to see a response in the ticket that said they had upgraded the gem and all worked well again. Just as a side note, if you freeze your local gem for RMagick and it is different than the RMagick version on the server, your site will fail to start up as well.
The final issue I ran into is that I use the truncate method on the home page of the CWOL.TV site. Well after doing some research Rails 2.2.2 and Ruby 1.8.7 do not agree with regard to the truncate method. I tried several work arounds and none of them worked. If you have a suggestion that will work in a shared hosting environment, I am open to it From what I can tell, the recommendation is to downgrade to Ruby 1.8.6. Good luck trying to get a hosting company to go backwards on dozens if not hundreds of servers.
For now I had to eliminate the truncate code from the site and work on another solution. It will really suck if I have to write my own truncate method to work around this mess.
Well I am done venting for a while. I hope that you do not think I am down on Site5. I love the company and when you get someone who knows what they are doing in tech support you can usually get things done pretty quickly. But if there was one area that could stand to be improved it would be communication.
Hmph. That sucks. They emailed me to notify me of the MySQL and (in my case) PHP upgrade. Maybe it was after your problem, and they learned a lesson from not notifying via email their customers.
By: Troy on February 22, 2009
at 5:33 pm
I am a noob with ruby on rails and your article on hosting ruby on rails websites on site5 supplied a lot of help. Thanks.
When I ran my tests I had a truncate warning.
Adding the length symbol put an end to the warnings.
<%=h truncate(article.information.gsub(//,”), :length => 270) %>
instead of
<%=h truncate(article.information.gsub(//,”), 270) %>
Let me know if problem still remains.
I think the next option will be to use “slice”.
Once again thanks for your contribution to the ruby on rails world.
By: Dextersmart on August 21, 2009
at 11:23 pm
You are most welcome. Any little thing I can do to help. Sometimes we get so wrapped up with what we are doing that we forget there are others who are dealing with the same things we are
. Your kind words are appreciated.
By: tszao on August 21, 2009
at 11:38 pm