Site5’s 5 dollar hosting deal gets better again
OK – I’m usually pretty critical in general, but this is the best hosting I’ve ever found, and it’s 3 times better than when I bought it, and it’s still the same price! So, you should click the image above and go sign up. These guys give you great support – I’ve contacted them numerous times and always had my problem solved within just a few minutes. I’ve noticed my site down once, and as soon as I emailed them, it was back up again. This blog is running Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails application, and it’s FAST! I barely ever see the kind of quick response from websites like I see from mine.
Features
- Full Ruby on Rails support. They have updated gems for you to use, but also allow you to keep your own gem repository in your home directory.
- Ready-to-go web applications with one-click installs
- Awesome tech support
- Very extensive wiki and forum where you can find out how to do anything you want with your account
- 165GB of storage!
- 5TB of bandwidth per month – which is great for transferring large files. I’ve never had a problem with the transfer speed, either.
- 165 domain pointers – This allows me to host all my domains with them. They have a great system for buying domains that I’ve used quite a bit too.
- Shell access
- Free setup!
- 60-day money back guarantee – If you don’t like it, you get all your bones back. How cool is that?
Benchmark
I have 16Mbit internet at home, and I decided just now to test the bandwidth of my site. Here are the results:
hank@rofl:/tmp$ wget -O /dev/null http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
--00:50:57-- http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
=> `/dev/null'
Resolving ralree.info... 70.47.124.108
Connecting to ralree.info|70.47.124.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 63,744,460 (61M) [audio/mp4]
100%[====================================>] 63,744,460 1.92M/s ETA 00:00
00:51:30 (1.86 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [63744460/63744460]
Yes, folks, thats 1.86 MEGABYTES per second.
My Maximum at 16Mbit is 2 Megabytes/second, meaning this completely maxed out my connection.
I used to be a Dreamhost customer, and it sucked. It sucked really bad. I’m so glad I switched. Compare the features to any other plan you can find for $5/month. This is as good as it gets.
Hello. And Bye. :)
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I was actually thinking about switching from dreamhost to site5 recently, but it seems that they don’t support Mongrel. My big problem with dreamhost was that my fcgi processes would die too fast, so low-traffic sites would be constantly having problems.
What’s your experience with site5’s fcgi setup? And can you use Capistrano to deploy and restart your site?
The FCGI situation at Site5 is pretty damn good. To restart, just `touch` **dispatch.fcgi**. Here’s a restart log, but I have moderate traffic, so YMMV:
<filter:code>
[30/Aug/2007:03:48:29 :: 20499] starting
[30/Aug/2007:05:12:48 :: 28140] starting
[30/Aug/2007:14:37:11 :: 20499] terminated gracefully
[30/Aug/2007:14:37:11 :: 28140] terminated gracefully
[30/Aug/2007:14:39:03 :: 18886] starting
[30/Aug/2007:14:45:52 :: 18886] terminated gracefully
[30/Aug/2007:14:48:47 :: 3651] starting
[30/Aug/2007:18:16:19 :: 11750] starting
[30/Aug/2007:21:18:21 :: 3651] terminated gracefully
[30/Aug/2007:21:18:21 :: 11750] terminated gracefully
[30/Aug/2007:21:19:02 :: 9987] starting
[30/Aug/2007:22:36:34 :: 27342] starting
## PS
me 9987 0.1 1.3 67812 57672 ? S Aug30 5:31 /usr/bin/ruby dispatch.fcgi
me 27342 0.0 1.1 54308 49244 ? S Aug30 1:03 /usr/bin/ruby dispatch.fcgi
## Top
top – 10:36:28 up 23 days, 20:28, 5 users, load average: 1.71, 2.26, 2.40
Tasks: 261 total, 4 running, 256 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu0 : 31.6% us, 13.8% sy, 0.0% ni, 49.1% id, 5.5% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu1 : 23.7% us, 11.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 58.4% id, 6.6% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu2 : 23.9% us, 13.8% sy, 0.0% ni, 61.4% id, 0.9% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Cpu3 : 27.7% us, 19.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 53.3% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 4151424k total, 3823396k used, 328028k free, 41684k buffers
Swap: 4096532k total, 5308k used, 4091224k free, 1247020k cached
## /proc/cpuinfo
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz
</filter:code>
It looks like the processes last between a few minutes and about 8 hours. I find that I consistently have 2 fcgi processes running, which is good. I never have to wait for one to start on access to non-cached pages. Load averages are low, which is awesome.
So this server I’m on has 4×2.8Ghz Intel Xeon cores with 4GB of memory. Lets count the users with fcgi processes:
<filter:code>
me@gaea log]$ ps aux | grep fcgi | cut -f 1 -d " " | uniq | wc -l
48
</filter:code>
So, there’s 48 users on this server. Not bad considering the last Dreamhost server I was on had more than 200. This is perfectly acceptable for a quad-core Xeon system.
I’ve used Mongrel quite a bit, and prefer it to fcgi most of the time, but the Site5 setup is the best I’ve ever encountered for reliability and speed.
Yes, you [can use Capistrano](http://tempe.st/2007/07/capistrano-2-on-site5/), but I never have.
###So, in summary, you should try it for the 60-day trial and see if it works for you.
Thanks for that, Hank – very good info. The other thing I’ve been upset with Dreamhost about is their email reliability. Driving me nuts lately.
On the plus side, Dreamhost is very transparent with their problems. They have an RSS feed for server issues, and they update it constantly with problems and resolutions. I’ll see if Site5 provides something similar. I’m not expecting perfection, and being able to be alerted to problems and to know when they are resolved is a big plus, at least for me.
Thanks again – if I do sign up in the near future, I’ll be sure to use the links you have here.
Here’s a nice [Maintenance RSS Feed](http://forums.site5.com/external.php?f=4&type=rss2). I got it from [here](http://forums.site5.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4), but had to manually add the **f=** param into the query string for the feed, which was a little non-intuitive. Anyway, that should probably do the trick the same way as the Dreamhost one does.
As far as email, I don’t use it on my domain, but I’m pretty sure it’s top-notch. They offer horde another one (squirrelmail perhaps?). Also, I think you can get POP and/or IMAP access easily.
Thanks for the comments – I appreciate the feedback. Also, thanks in advance for using my signup link.