For quite some time now, I’ve found that the options for good Rails hosting have been significantly lacking.  As a consultant/contractor on a huge range of projects, I’m often asked for advice, guidance, or help in choosing and setting up servers for a client.  Nearly every client or customer wants the same thing:

1. Stability/reliability
2. Flexibility/room to grow
3. Someone to keep things running
4. Someone to call when they need help
   

The first two options are met by a lot of providers.  Tier IV datacenters, hardware redundancy, and virtualization are a dime-a-dozen nowadays and building a good Rails stack is just about the same for everyone.

However, the rub is in #3 & #4.  As my colleagues, peers, and I are already work full-time writing new applications, there is precious little time for system administration and support of completed projects and old apps.  Even with extensive automation, a small 1-3 person team can write many more Rails apps than they can support long-term.

Inevitably, the client wants to know “Who is going to keep things going once development is done?” and “Who can I call when things stop working?”.  Set them up on a physical machines, VPSes, EC2, or anything else and the developer is left with little choice but to help keep that server running long-term.  Including late night phone calls when something goes wrong.  And can you honestly say you are regularly doing all the little extra things that need to be done?  General maintenance?  Security patches?  Tuning?

Want an alternative?  AWS Premium support won’t touch your software stack.  Rackspace won’t support Rails.  Slicehost: no managed option at all.  There’s really only one player: just google ‘rails cloud support’.

So my question is: If you can get easy, scalable, on-demand hosting, why can’t you get easy, scalable, on-demand support? My answer to this issue is to launch a service that lets developers keep developing while someone else takes care of the system administration long-term:  RoundHouse Support.  Please read my public release announcement and then come check us out!

I’m very happy today to announce a new community service available for Rails shops: RoundHouse – Server Management and Support.

RoundHouse is a cooperative solution for getting managed servers and system administration for your Rails stack, no matter what host you use.  We’re gathering a pool of specialists that you can call upon to get the help you need.  Whether that’s emergency support when you’re having server problems, regular day-to-day duties, or assistance in configuring a particularly difficult piece of software.

This is a service that provides freelancers, development shops, and companies alike an opportunity to focus on their product instead of on their hosting.  For developers this means freeing up more time to code.  For those running a website it means reliable service from a great group of experts.  For everyone it means having someone available whenever you need it.

Obviously this is a new offering and system administration (much like your hosting provider) must be utterly reliable.  So we’re beginning to establish a base set of clients to try out our service for free.  This gives us the chance to get established, continue to develop a solid organizational structure, and to expand our brand.  For our customers, it means you’re going to excellent sysadmin support at no charge while you learn about all the great things we can offer (and then hopefully recommend us to all your friends!).  So if you’ve been needing help setting up or running your Rails app, please contact us to get started.

We’re also looking to add additional members to our team as we continue to grow.  If you have expertise in system administration, elements of the Rails stack, or are just a great DevOp, please e-mail us at jobs@roundhousesupport.com and we can talk more!

Finally, please feel free to read my expanded rationale for how this service fits into the Rails ecosystem.

There has been an explosion of late on new ways to deal with tracking exceptions thrown in a production Rails app.  It used to be that you put in exception_notifier and went about your business.  But not too long ago I decided that I needed more.  Two things started this push:

1. There was more than just me working on a project.  Several people needed easy access to the exceptions (at times) but I didn’t want to clutter their inboxes with e-mails for every exception.
2. I would not be working on the project forever and others would be handling long term maintenance.  This meant changing the e-mail addresses in the config file quite often and just felt like ‘the wrong way’ to be doing it.

So I started looking for other alternatives.  Here’s an overview of the three I found:

Exception Logger

Let’s start with the positive.  Exception logger is exactly what I was looking for.  It provides the functionality I was looking for and makes tracking exceptions with multiple users easy.  Unfortunately, the install procedure is a mess.  The standard plugin just would not work for me.  Rails is notoriously bad at handling controllers/models/views that are inside a plugin so exception logger really needs to be built on Engines for that kind of functionality.  Instead, it uses a number of hacks to try and get Rails to recognize the code in the plugin and it just doesn’t work well.  Plus, in order to get added functionality (such as authentication) into the controller, you’re supposed to use a config file!  It’s a crazy unclean mess.  So in order to get it operating, I was forced to simply take the controller, views, etc and put them into the normal app tree.  This took a lot of setup and debugging, but I was able to get it to running and now it works extremely well.  I have it in one high-use production app and I’m very happy but I don’t expect to use it much more.  You lose the ability to e-mail notifications (at least not without hacking some more of the plugin) as well, so it’s only good in a few select cases.

Exceptional

Now we start getting to the fun stuff.  Several new exception monitoring applications have sprung up recently and I decided to check them out.  Exceptional is a hosted service and although I’d really prefer to have my exceptions tracked locally on a per-app basis, having them aggregated does have its benefits.  It’s totally free, so sign up for a username, then create a new app profile to get an api key.  Install their plugin and paste in the key and you’re set.  It runs in production mode and sends the exceptions off to their logging service.  It integrates with lighthouse, campfire, and twitter (none of which I use, but I’m sure it helps others) and will also e-mail you the notifications.

Once again, though, some issues made it unusable.  It appeared to work great, but as I started doing some system administration, I started running into a number of problems.  Whenever the plugin loads (when in production mode) it dumps a set of debug messages to stdout.  Every time time I’d load a production console (for working on a few issues that could only be tested on the production/staging server) I’d get messages about its attempt to connect.  Then a few seconds later, interrupting whatever I started, there would be more messages about the successful connection.  Unfortunately it does this when running rake tasks as well, so all my cron jobs that use rake tasks were now littered with these messages.  I was prepared to just edit the plugin to stop these messages, but instead I came across our next entry.

Hoptoad

Hoptoad is very simple, free, and nearly identical to Exceptional.  Sign up (you get your own subdomain), add an app profile, install the plugin, and copy the api key.  It doesn’t have the extra integrations of exceptional (though I’ll bet they’re coming), but it does everything I need and without the annoying messages.  It also lets you give extra users access to errors from certain apps only (as does Exceptional, although it wasn’t immediately obvious whereas Exceptional appears to be one username only).  One thing I will really miss from Exceptional is that it tracked 404 errors as well.  Although 404s usually come from scan bots, some may very well be legitimate broken links on or to your site, so it’s nice to track them.

Summary

Overall, I would highly recommend Exceptional and Hoptoad for everyone for all their exception tracking from now on.  Which one you use just comes down to a matter of taste right now and maybe your specific requirements.  I’m very excited to see what further features they add to differentiate themselves and I am REALLY hoping to see integration with scoutapp somehow, as I think exception handling and performance monitoring go hand-in-hand.

Finally, please feel free to comment on your own experiences with any of these projects!

Monitoring your production Rails application is a very important part of deploying and operating a web app. There are several more general solutions that work very well: Nagios, Munin, etc. As of late, however, several Rails specific options have come into common use. I’d like to discuss the three big players here:

FiveRuns RM-Manage

The FiveRuns client has been out for about a year and offers a terrific suite of monitoring: Server load/memory, MySQL queries, Rails errors, etc. As of version 2.0 (which is in open beta is and will be released for customers during RailsConf) it also supports monitoring your mongrels. It works great, but can get a pretty expensive ( They don’t publish their prices, but I’m paying $30/server ). It is an good choice for most users.

NewRelic RPM

I’ve been beta testing the NewRelic RPM service for the past few months. It’s a decent service, it’s very easy to install, but is very limited. It will monitor your server load/memory, slow queries, etc as will all the other monitoring tools. But beyond that it doesn’t offer much. You are limited to graphing only a 24 hour period of data, so you can’t see any kind of long term trends.  They have an amazing backend system for collecting data and their site is the fastest and most responsive I’ve ever seen.  Once they get their UI front-end featureset to match their amazing data collection system, they’re going to be awesome.  As of today, they opened to the general public and released their pricing. It is based on the number of mongrel/thin instances no matter how many servers (at least that’s my understanding). For a small to medium app running up to 40 mongrels (which would probably be 2-4 servers), you’ll wind up paying $250 / month, as compared to $60-120 for FiveRuns. Overall, given the limited functionality and hefty price, I can’t yet recommend NewRelic. I hope to see it grow and quickly add more features to change my mind.

Scout App

The third option is Scout App. It offers the same suite of monitoring features as the others, but goes a step further by offering a huge range of additional plugins that will allow you to customize its functionality and easily set up extra functionality such as restart dying mongrels. You can also write your own plugins. To add another scoop on this already monstrous sundae, Scout App is the cheapest of all. It will run you only $29.00 / month for four servers.

If I had to pick one service to recommend, it would likely be Scout. They provide just about everything you can ask for out of a monitoring app at the lowest price point. If anybody else has experience with these services, please add your own comments!

I
recently received Ezra’s new book "Deploying Rails Applications" in
the mail.  It is a terrific reference and I will be following up shortly with an in-depth review.

I was quite delighted to find that I had already done even the most advanced tasks regarding scaling at
least once or twice (e.g. load balanced app servers, clustered MySQL,
Memcached, CDN for static files, & extensive
benchmarking/profiling/optimization).