[Catalyst] Dreamhost for Catalyst

[Danny Warren]

I think most virtual hosts wouldn't support persistent connections or 
mod_perl, just because it goes against the basic way that virtual hosts 
are set up (needing access to the apache config itself, unique instance, 
etc).

Here is the part where you get flooded with host recommendations from 
everyone!

I use these guys: http://asmallorange.com/

Shoot them an e-mail, they might be willing to set you up with something 
custom.

The main reason I love them over other hosts I have used (dreamhost, 
etc) is that they are willing to help you out to get your setup tweaked 
for whatever you need, even though I am just a lowly virtual server 
customer on a cheap account.

The server I am hosted on was missing FCGI.pm, and I couldn't install it 
as a non-root user (FCGI needs a bunch of stuff above and beyond most 
normal perl modules, and the headers it needed weren't in the chroot 
jail).  They didn't make me jump through a bunch of hoops or give me 
funny looks like I was doing something sneaky, they just said "no 
problem" and within an hour it was on the box.

I was able to compile everything else I needed for catalyst in my home 
dir, and had a fastcgi + catalyst setup going without any problems. 
They also seemed interested in making Catalyst available by default, 
which would be really cool.  I haven't circled back and talked to them 
about that yet (I was just trying to make sure that it worked in the 
first place before I totally dove in to catalyst).

Here is the test page, running under fcgi and connecting to postgres:

http://www.dannywarren.com/test/

Only downside to fcgi is that if nobody has hit it in a while, you have 
to wait a second for it to kick off a fcgi process for your app.  Still, 
doing that takes less time than rendering it a cgi, and it only needs 
done in between huge traffic gaps on your site.

Danny

Toby Corkindale wrote:
> Hi guys,
> was chatting to someone about hosting a low-traffic Catalyst site, and 
> the subject of Dreamhost came up - they (apparently) offer particularly 
> cheap virtual servers (about £5/month), and judging by their website, 
> you receive a shell and can compile your own apps, including it says, 
> CGI apps.
> 
> I was wondering how appropriate it would be for running a 
> database-backed Catalyst app though. There is support for persistent 
> MySQL databases (i don't know about PostgreSQL), but I don't know about 
> mod_perl or fastcgi apps.
> 
> Has anyone else tried using them?
> You don't get a unique IP address, so I suspect you don't get your own 
> Apache instance either, so that probably rules out mod_perl.
> 
> I guess I could always have a CGI-only version of the catalyst app, but 
> catalyst takes quite a while to load up on bigger apps..
> 
> Cheers,
> Toby
> 
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