Mongrel Hosting at OCS Solutions
With OCS Hosting you can power your Ruby on Rails apps with the lightweight and powerful Mongrel server.OCS Solutions is proud to announce our support for Mongrel, a lightweight and fast HTTP server for Ruby applications. It includes support for the popular Ruby on Rails framework, as well as Og+Nitro, and Camping.
Our Mongrel hosting is similar to our support for Lighttpd. You can simply have your Mongrel instance listen on the port we assign you, then we proxy that through Apache to show on your website just as Apache or any other website would display it. Using Mongrel, you can achieve faster speed than with Apache/FastCGI or plain CGI mode with frameworks like Ruby on Rails.
Using Mongrel with Your Rails Application
Starting Mongrel on your OCS Solutions hosting account is almost too easy. Simply change into the directory of your Ruby on Rails application and start Mongrel on the port you've been assigned, like this:
cd ~/rails_apps/myapp mongrel_rails start -p 60000 -d
The commands above assume you've been assigned port 60000, but this will differ with each customer. Could it be more simple?
Not only will you be able to view your application at http://YOUR_DOMAIN:60000 (replacing YOUR_DOMAIN with your domain name, and 60000 with the port number you've been assigned) before we switch your Apache instance over to use Mongrel, but you can use it afterwords as well for testing and diagnostic purposes.
Which is better - Lighttpd or Mongrel?
That's like the debate between Coke and Pepsi, Republicans and Democrats, or Chocolate and Vanilla. There's no definitive answer. Lighttpd has a longer history and therefore may be preferred right now for production use. That said, Mongrel is stable and major sites are using it as well. In the end, its likely to fall to which you prefer the most, or which one works best for your specific needs.
The beauty of the flexibility of our hosting environment is though that you can try them both to see which one you like the most.
Host Your Rails App with Mongrel and OCS!
Want to learn more about our hosting? Visit our web hosting page. You can also contact us if you have any questions. We're here to help!
