Cristiano on Tech/Life

I am looking for a simple Ruby on Rails hosting provider because running FastCGI on Dreamhost has proven to be everything but fast. I had a quick look at some servers that offer Mongrel instances, but these tend to too expensive as you pay a lot per instance. I want to play around with more than one app, so renting more than one Mongrel instance (you can only run one app per server) is not an option.

I had a look at some hosting providers and decided to give HostingRails.com a try. They seemed to be very Rails oriented, cheap ($3.59 a month) and offered an easy upgrade to Mongrel if this would ever be necessary. Setting up a FastCGI app on their server was easy and much faster than DreamHost. I really don’t get what is wrong with the FastCGI on Dreamhost!

Unfortunately they use cPanel, which places the root of any subdomain as a folder in the main domain. This is just plain stupid and most other hosting providers make different Document Roots for every (sub)domain. Lucky for me they have a 30-day money back option which I opted for, so no money lost. I am having a look now at Site5 ($5 per month for quite a lot more) but I am first mailing them to see how they handle subdomains. They have a 60 day money back guarantee, so I will probably be trying them out next week. I hope that this one works properly as I want to get some apps up and running.

So after my second harddisk problem with Samsung (the first problem even caused some data loss) I decided to buy a new harddisk. I ordered a 160GB Western Digital SATA disk for my laptop at about €110, doubling my disk space.

I will send my broken harddisk back to Samsung again and whenever I get this one back I think I will probably sell it. I noticed that I have grown to put quality over price, by not buying the cheapest harddisk but the most reliable one. With all the data I create every week I just don’t want to risk a loss.

My new 80GB harddisk is dying, again. So what is next? I’m thinking of buying a nice 160GB harddisk to replace this disk (and then send it for RMA). It is sad though that the cheapest 160GB 2.5″ sata is from Samsung, just like the faulty 80GB.

This blog has been become less and less important since I started heavy blogging on FourStarters and teachr.tv. I do still want to use this blog for some more technical/personal related material so I decided to give some parts of this site a revamp. First of all I updated my CV, which needed some extra information. Then I motivated Melinda to start blogging too, after which I decided to go do something else. I am currently working on a small Ruby on Rails project that will be my first mashup and professional RoR project.

So don’t worry, this blog will get some attention again soon as I still have some drafts left and plenty ideas at hand. For now I have to focus a bit on my project but stay tunned for the result. For real time updates you can always have a look at my Jaiku page.