I am finally ready to deploy the rails application I have been working on for the last couple of months (no link yet, couple more weeks of bug fixes). Instead of going with a shared account, which I have never liked for all the obvious reasons, I went with a dedicated Linux box at CrystalTech. I chose CrystalTech because I have always used them for my windows dedicated boxes and have had a great experience so far.
Of course I didn't really think about the fact that I hadn't really used Linux much in the the last 10 years. Thankfully CrystalTech handles installing most of the necessary stuff like Apache, MySQL, VSFTP, etc, etc. So I just had to install rails and get it all setup. It took a little longer than I expected, and I learned a fair amount about VI and Apache in the process, but I finally got it all setup and working.
The only way I got it done was with some great help from the Raleigh.rb mailing list, and mixing the instructions here and here. I now have Apache serving up all the static files and a mongrel cluster (using Apache's mod_proxy_balancer) to handle the rails work. I couldn't be happier!
-James
