Under the Digital Cloud

We are delighted to announce our support for hosting Django applications on our shared hosting servers, effective immediately.

Our initial demand for Django was very low, and since we have a strong focus in hosting Ruby on Rails and PHP, our Python/Django support was limited.  However, we have recently developed a deployment procedure for Django applications and have documented it in our wiki article titled Deploying a Django Site.

As an added benefit, we also now support the WSGI module for Apache, allowing the hosting of non-Django applications, such as Zope, CherryPy, and TurboGears, to name a few.  Our documentation only covers Django currently, but we look forward to adding more documentation on other Python-oriented frameworks soon.  In  the meantime, we’ll be glad to help with any issues you have deploying non-Django Python framework-based applications.

I’m delighted to announce that we have increased the bandwidth allotments on all shared hosting plans, effective October 20, 2009.  On some plans, the bandwidth limit has been nearly doubled, and on others it has increased by at least 50%.

You can find the new bandwidth limits on our shared hosting page.

We are applying these changes to all servers, but some servers will be upgraded before others. We intend to have all upgrades complete by November 1st, 2009.  If you find your account hasn’t been upgraded yet and its after November 1st, 2009, please open a ticket and we’ll be glad to perform the upgrade.

On select production cPanel servers, we have upgraded to Passenger 2.2.2.  This new release offers a variety of new features and substantial performance improvements, but we’ve had to make one slight change to our Passenger deployment routine.  Due to this, you’ll have to add a line to your .htaccess file in your public folder in your Rails app with the contents:

PassengerAppRoot /home/user/rails_apps/yourapp

Replace “user” with your username and “rails_apps/yourapp”  with the path to your Rails application. 

On the servers we have deployed the upgrade to we have added this to any existing .htaccess file or created a new one with that line in it.  However, if you use Subversion or Git repository, you’ll need to add this change to it so that the next time you do an update this change will be preserved. 

You have not made this change already, please do so as soon as you can.  This will ensure upgrades on the rest of our shared hosting cluster will go smoothly.

On the off chance that your Rails application isn’t functioning correctly, make sure the above line is in your .htaccess file in the public folder of your Rails application.

Effective March 1st, 2009, we are upgrading our shared hosting plans to include more RAM.  This really applies only to customers who use Ruby on Rails, Django, or another long-running user-created process.  This extra RAM will make more room for your application and give you more breathing room to avoid running over on your plan.

Many have asked our policy on RAM usage and how we enforce the limits.  All of the RAM limits on shared hosting are soft, with a high hard limit to prevent a runaway process with a memory leak to cause problems for other accounts.  If your Rails application goes over your limit by 5 or 10% we do not typically mind.  Since we don’t oversell, the limits are there to help keep resources free for all users on shared hosting plans.  If you start to use too much RAM over the buffer zone we allow for all accounts, we will notify you with options on how to proceed.

These new limits will take effect both on new and existing accounts.

I’m delighted to announce some significant improvements that we have made on the OCS website, particularly in regards to navigation.  The top navigation single layer menu has been replaced with a drop-down menu to aid in faster navigation.  In addition, the bottom of the site now has a mini-navigation area so you can quickly move to other pages of interest.

We have added a new page on our managed hosting service.  Back by popular demand, this service frees you from the headaches of server management and lets you focus on your business.  We have also introduced a managed shared hosting plan which provides support above the standard level of already comprehensive support offered by our shared hosting service.

We are in the process with working out promotions with 3rd party vendors that we’ll be able to offer you for free or at a reduced cost.  I’ll be providing more details on that in our next post.

If you haven’t yet signed up for our low-volume mailing list, please take a moment to do so.  Each e-mail will be loaded with information you can use, including tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your website.

Many of our customers have asked where they can get the latest news and updates on OCS products and services, as well as opinions from our staff.  Our forums usually served as this outlet, but unfortunately, there has been no cohesive place for this.

This new blog is an attempt to change that.  We’ll be posting here on a regular basis, sometimes daily.  You’ll hear mainly from me, but also from the rest of our staff, sharing news that affects both OCS customers and thoughts and ideas on current Internet technology topics of interest.

Our old posts have been archived and can be found at the old OCS Solutions Blog, but we will phase them out eventually.

Please feel free to comment on any post you see here and share your thoughs with us as well.  We love hearing from you!