Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

We have now installed Ruby on Rails 2.1.2 on all servers. As this release contains security fixes it’s recommended that all users of Rails 2.1.x switch to the new 2.1.2 version ASAP.

Rails 2.0.5 has been release which contains security fixes. It’s advised all customers using a 2.0.x version of Rails update their applications to use the 2.0.5 version as soon as possible.

Today marks the start of the domain name bonanza event at Media72. For the next few months we will be slashing the price of domains for one week only! To kick things off we are starting with .mobi’s, the domain extension designed for mobile devices. From now until midnight on Tuesday next week you will be able to secure your own .mobi domain at up to a massive 50% off our regular price.

The normal price for .mobi domains is £25 per year, signup within the next week and get your .mobi domain from only £12.50 per year.

Register you .mobi domain now

Not in the market for a .mobi domain?

Don’t worry, each Tuesday we’ll discount a new extension with a different amount each time. We may even pull some crazy discounts out of out hats in limited amounts so watch this space for more info.

Update: This issue has now been resolved, new sign ups can be made as normal. It turns out the issue was a power outage affecting the entire area around 2Checkout’s facility.

Our payment solutions provide, 2checkout, has been experiencing a sustained denial of service attack over the last few days. Unfortunately this means we have been unable to take any new signups automatically during this time. If you would like to purchase any Media72 products or services please contact our sales department directly sales@media72.co.uk and we will be able to setup accounts manually until the 2checkout site is working again. Thankfully existing customers are not affected by this issue. We appologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

On another note, we are in the process of setting up a new billing system and hope to have this up and running shortly. The new system will be a lot more flexible and easy to use and will benefit both new and existing customers.

Stages 3 of migrating customers away from the bingo server are now complete. All reseller accounts have been migrated successfully to the shipstern.media72.net or teahupoo.media72.net servers.

As part of the migration we have checked each website to ensure it loads, we advise all customers to check each website to ensure it is working correctly. If you encounter any issues please see our account migrations fixes support article where you will find fixes for the most common migration issues.

All customers not using the media72 nameservers please remember to change to the new IP address asap. All websites (apart from customers who have a dedicated IP address) should now point to:

85.13.243.211 for shipstern.media72.net
85.13.243.178 for teahupoo.media72.net

There are still a couple of accounts left on bingo that we will be migrating over the weekend.

Please don’t hesitate to contact support if you have any issues with your website after the migration.

Stages 2 of migrating customers away from the bingo server are now complete. All shared accounts have been migrated successfully to the shipstern.media72.net server.

As part of the migration we have checked each website to ensure it loads, we advise all customers to check each website to ensure it is working correctly. If you encounter any issues please see our account migrations fixes support article where you will find fixes for the most common migration issues.

All customers not using the media72 nameservers please remember to change to the new IP address asap. All websites (apart from customers who have a dedicated IP address) should now point to 85.13.243.211.

Please don’t hesitate to contact support if you have any issues with your website after the migration.

The first stage of migrating customer away from the bingo server is now complete. All ruby on rails accounts have been migrated successfully to the teahupoo.media72.net server.

As part of the migration we have checked each website to ensure it loads, we advise all customers to check each website to ensure it is working correctly. If you encounter any issues please see our account migrations fixes support article where you will find fixes for the most common migration issues.

All customers not using the media72 nameservers please remember to change to the new IP address asap. All websites (apart from customers who have a dedicated IP address) should now point to 85.13.243.178.

Please don’t hesitate to contact support if you have any issues with your website after the migration.

It’s been a little over two months since we switched our Ruby on Rails hosting packages from FastCGI to mod rails (Phusion Passenger), what better time then for a debrief on how the switch went and what we have discovered two months on. I’m sure no one will be surprised to hear mod rails is far superior to FastCGI in pretty much every way.

Firstly the initial switch, for the most part it went very well, nearly all rails applications worked exactly the same under mod rails as they did FastCGI. A very small number of applications had issues, all of which were easy to fix within a few minutes. Overall the switch went very smoothly only requiring an apache rebuild and the mod rails installation.

Initially we started using the 1.x branch of mod rails, with a large number of rails applications running we noticed Apache would locking up periodically and require a manual restart. This issue only occurred on production servers running many rails applications and was not apparent on our test servers. The problem turned out to be fairly wide spread on servers with a lot of traffic. The Phusion Passenger guys were quick to respond to feedback and remedied the problem with a 2.x beta release. Since upgrading to the 2.x branch of mod rails it’s been rock solid!

What benefits have we seen since switching to mod rails hosting?

Firstly, startup time has been greatly reduced. Where as FastCGI needs to load the rails core code as well as the applications code into memory each time it’s started, mod rails keeps the rails core code in memory so only the applications code needs to be loaded. This has reduced rails application start up time from around 5-25 seconds to about 2-10 seconds depending on the size of the application. A huge difference I’m sure you will agree.

Another benefit of mod rails is the reduced memory usage and better process management. When running FastCGI we needed to keep watch for runaway processes using too much memory, spawning too many children or processes that had simple become stuck. Mod rails has none of these issues, in our experience processes are stopped correctly when not in use and memory usage is always within acceptable limits. Mod rails keeps rails applications in check meaning there is little external process management needed.

Our customers are much happier using our mod rails offerings. Deployment is easier, applications are more stable, faster and more responsive, and don’t suffer form any of the FastGCI setup peculiarities. In a nutshell customers can do more themselves without needing to contact us for help or guidance. Customers are also loving the faster application startup time, when running FastCGI we would often get emails from customers asking why their application took so long to load the first time it was requested, since switching we have not had a single email regarding application startup time, it’s simple not an issue any more.

To find out more about our range of mod rails hosting accounts in the UK take a look at our rails package page. Why not take one for a spin? With free setup and our 30 day full refund money back guarantee can you think of a reason not to give us try?