Dreamhost announced today that they’re supporting Passenger (mod_rails) in their Apache installation. Passenger is an old idea (embedding an interpreter and libraries in Apache) applied to the very specific Ruby on Rails scenario. Passenger is touted as a plug-and-play, point Apache at your Rails public directory one step web application deployment solution.
I have to imagine, given Dreamhosts adoption of the technology, that Passenger works more or less as advertised. I’m also certain that this will make deploying Rails applications at Dreamhost much easier. It was never fun figuring out why Apache is randomly getting bad headers from a Rails fastcgi process.
Recently, however, I switched to Slicehost for my Rails sites (I have two). I’m running nginx with mongrel servers for each app, which works very well. There is a noticeable speed increase compared to when the sites were running on Dreamhost (Apache + fastcgi). I highly recommend Slicehost for VPS – they are very nicely priced and everything is easy to use. That said, Dreamhost has good shared hosting, for what it’s worth, and their prices are very good.
By the way, if you’re looking for shared hosting, sign up for Dreamhost and enter the promo code GOTERKYOURSELF to save $50 (and make me some money). If you’re looking for a VPS sign up for Slicehost (I get a referral from this link, too).