And Planet Argon it is

Posted by ryan
at 8:30 AM on Saturday, November 05, 2005

It was pretty clear after my last post that there are some good options when it comes to Rails hosting (and there are some having a few issues – hopefully all temporary). So after checking it all out, I’m going to start out with Planet Argon, which makes me an argonaut, er planetonian, er planaliscious argoharrian? Anyway, if you can get past their very 1995-ish sign-up process (snail mail or fax the hosting agreement and no way to enter a credit card into a web form), it’s all good. Great personal service and you can always find help on their IRC channel. Their startup documentation is still very much a work in progress (i.e. I can’t find any) which forces you to be somewhat intelligent and figure stuff out on your own. But when Robby (the techie-owner) is always a stone’s throw away on IRC, that’s not an issue. Thanks to all those who commented on the original post, it turned out to be quite an active discussion.

If you sign up yourself and want to throw me a bone, put me down as your referrer. It will make me happy, which makes me happy.

Comments

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  1. Robby Russell – May 10, 2006 @ 08:22 PM
    We've just launched a documentation project! "PLANET ARGON Documentation Project":http://docs.planetargon.com
  2. bitbutter – May 10, 2006 @ 08:22 PM
    Glad to hear your experience of PA has been good so far. I'm having less luck (maybe it's harder for me to catch the support in IRC because of a timezone thing :) ). A user forum at PA would be very welcome! Incase you have time, maybe you could clear up a very basic question for me about PA hosting (i'm a bit desperate at this point): I've set up have a subdomain on my hosting (eg mysubdomain.mydoman.com), I'd like to host a rails app there. Where would i upload the rails app to? (same question goes for setting up an app on the 'main' domain too). Thanks! (nice blog, bookmarked)
  3. Ryan Daigle – May 10, 2006 @ 09:07 PM
    bitbutter, I've not had a superbly fulfilling experience with Planet Argon after all... Support emails are rarely returned and machines are stable at all either. I get the sense they're growing their consulting business with a bit more attention than their hosting business. Oh well, live and learn... As for your subdomain/upload question: When I wanted set up a blog.xxx subdomain I had to email their tech support to get a proxy opened up to that subdomain - and then I just edited my lighttpd config file to recognize requests to that subdomain and then point to whatever directory I wanted. As for where you upload your app for the main domain - mine is in the ~/apps/appname directory. I take it you don't have one of those? If not, take a look at your lighttpd file in ~/conf/ and see where it's pointing to. Hope that helps! Let me know if you want me to contact you offline if you're still having problems...