blog.philcrissman.com

Just found and read David Heinemeier Hansson’s post on The deal with shared hosts, and Dallas’ from Dreamhost posts on How Rails Could Be Better and his riposte. All interesting.

And, it turns out, pertinent to my own situation, as I’m currently using Dreamhost’s shared hosting, and trying to run Rails on it. This blog is the only “real” Rails app I’m running, and I didn’t write any part of it. I’ve started doing my development on my own local machine (as it seems to make a lot more sense to do it that way), but I’m obviously going to want to eventually deploy what I write to the server.

Now, with only one real exception, I’ve had little trouble with Rails on Dreamhost. Everything has mostly “just worked”. This blog stopped working for a bit, but it turned out that all I probably really should have done is re-run dispatch.fcgi.

So on the one hand, we have a group saying “Rails should be easier to run on shared hosting.” On the other hand, we have a group seeming to say, “Real Rails developers don’t use shared hosting.” (To be fair, what Hansson really said was that he’d love to see Rails run well on shared hosting and that the Rails team would happily cooperate with anyone wishing to work on that challenge.)

I’m reminded of a quote that stuck with me; it’s from Hansson’s keynote at RailsConf 2006. (emphasis added)

I don’t really think Rails currently is in a position where it should bend to the outside world. I think we’re actually working very well at bending the outside world to us.

I’m not going to try to defend or condemn that statement. Rather, I’m going to suggest that an “opinionated” framework, like Rails, would not be possible without that sort of attitude. Like it or not, I’m not sure Rails would be what it is without it.

So yes. Let’s have people who are interested and capable looking into the issue of improving the performance of Rails in shared hosting. The hosting companies will like it, and from Hansson’s post it’s clear that the Rails core team will welcome such improvements as well.

But let’s not think that Rails developers should drop everything and work on a problem which is not really “their” problem.