When I started out with Ruby on Rails I was using my Bluehost account to host everything but found that it was cumbersome to configure and wasn’t flexible enough. So recently, I opened an account with Linode and after a month I think I’ve settled into the right setup.

And so I’d like to take a minute to share that setup and see if I can get some feedback on it.

Quick overview: I have a Unbuntu 8.04 LTS server running Nginx with Passenger to serve my Ruby on Rails apps and hope to add Asterisk and a PHP web server (for ExpressionEngine) in the future.

To get myself up and running I followed Linode Library’s Getting Started Guide and then the Ruby on Rails with Nginx on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy) guide.

I ran into some problems getting Passenger setup, apparently I forgot to run it as Sudo, go figure.

Then I had a hard time setting it up to serve multiple Rails apps. I kept getting a 403 error and I wasn’t sure what was going on, well I found a blog post by Priit Tamboom that explained my problem and I was up and running.

Now all the meanwhile, to edit configuration files I would SSH into the server and then use VI which was terribly painful but fortunately a Node member introduced me to SSHFS for OS X which is making life much easier.

Now all I have left to do is move my two ExpressionEngine blogs over (matthewforr.com and whatsamattyfo.com) and I would like to setup Asterisk for some telephony interactive code games. All in all, I’m happy with Linode, deploying Ubuntu was easy, monitoring is easy and the price while more than I would like it pay is cheaper than Amazon.

Please leave comments about this setup or send me an email to me.