Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

Media72 are pleased to announce the immediate availability of mod_rails driven Ruby on Rails hosting packages. Mod_rails, or Phusion Passenger as it is also known, has been gaining a lot of attention recently, and rightly so. It’s a huge step forward for the Rails hosting community in terms of application deployment and management. Many big names in the industry such as David Heinemeier Hansson and Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) already have good things to say about mod_rails.

Mod_rails vastly simplifies Ruby on Rails deployment, no longer will you have to mess around with .htaccess files or deal with fastcgi fickleness. Deployment can be as simple as uploading your rails application then loading it in your browser. And restarting your application is achieved by simply creating a text file called restart.txt in your rails tmp directory, what could be more simple?

Our customers are already enjoying the benefits of mod_rails and we are one of the only hosts in the UK to offer support for mod_rails at this time. All of our rails accounts are hosted in our well connected London data centre which means fantastic speeds around Europe. Using Media72 you will also enjoy better search engine rankings with the UK engines when compared to hosting elsewhere.

Why not take a look at our comprehensive range of mod_rails based packages? Prices start from only £7 a month.

It has come to our attention that many users have not been receiving system update notifications via email due to spam filters of incorrect email addresses in our system. We will now be publishing all update notifications to our blog, as well as to all affected users via their primary contact email. What follows is a repost of the details sent out to customers last week:

As of today, all severs now only have versions 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 1.2.6, and 1.1.6 or the rails gem installed. Please update any rails applications you have to use these versions only. To update the version of rails you are using edit your config/environment.rb file and set the RAILS_GEM_VERSION to one of the installed versions.

Our rails version policy is to keep most new versions of rails installed, unless a security hole or performance issue has been identified, and two old major versions. For instance, at this time we have two flavours of 2.x and the two most up-do-date old versions, 1.2.6 and 1.1.6.

When the next major version of rails is release, e.g. 2.1 or above, we will send out notifications and remove version 1.1.6. We will be keeping rails version 1.2.6 for some time to support legacy customers as the upgrade from 1.x to 2.x can require some amount of work.

The Media72 Team

After upgrading our servers to Rails 2.0 it has come to our attention this has caused problems for some customers rails applications where the application will fail to start. This will happen when your application is not set to use a specific version of rails and will therefor load the most recent version of rails. On servers where customers have been affected we have removed rails 2.0. This is a temporary measure to give customers time to upgrade their applications. We will be reinstalling rails 2.0 on all servers on Friday 14th December. Read on to see how to make sure your rails application will still work after the upgrade.
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Thats right folks, today is a big day for Rails and marks the release of version 2.0. For a full run down see DHH’s post on the the Ruby on Rails site. We have already upgraded all of our servers to include Rails 2.0.1 so that you guys can get your teeth into it straight away. Sign up with any one of our rails accounts and get instant access to Rails 2.0.
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Hot on the heals of the 1.2.4 release rails 1.2.5 is now out, as usual all of our servers have been upgraded. Rails 1.2.5 is a security and maintenance release that fixes a JSON XSS vulnerability, fixes a couple of minor regressions introduced in 1.2.4, and backports a handful of features and fixes from the 2.0 preview release.
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Hot on the heals of the Ruby on Rails 2.0 & 1.2.4 announcement the Rails team have released Rails version 1.2.4. At Media72 Hosting we always keep bang up to date with our Rails software so that you guys always have the option of using the latest release. Customers now have the option, on most servers, of using Rails 1.2.4, 1.2.3, 1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6, or 1.1.3, along with our large number of installed gems.

In preparation of future system upgrades we have moved our support system to a new url. The new location is https://support.media72.net please update your bookmarks accordingly, we are redirecting all urls from the old system to the new url so all legacy links should still work with the new system. All existing tickets and support emails will remain identical.

Thanks,
Media72 Team

Our support system is currently unavailable due to a miss match in the version of PHP and Zend Optimizer we are using. We are currently working on this issue and should have it resolved shortly.

Your patience on this matter is appreciated.

Update:

We have now fixed the issue and the support service is back to normal.