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GoDaddy on Rails

dennis 4 comments Ruby on Rails

Jun 11

I’ve added a few posts talking about the shortcomings of GoDaddy’s Rails configuration. While most of the issues I’ve dealt with are acceptable, there’s one that’s not. I recently contacted GoDaddy about having my Rails app live in the webroot. This means that users would be able to access this via http://mydomain.com. It turns out that Godaddy DOES NOT support Rails applications that live in the webroot. Therefore the app would live in a subdirectory and look something like http://www.mydomain.com/myapp/.

While that seems like a minor detail I think it’s one that should not be overlooked. In certain instances web applications need user friendly URLs and not something that’s difficult to remember. At least that’s what I firmly believe. Since GoDaddy is going for the mass market when it comes to domain registrations and web hosting I don’t see them specializing in Rails hosting. That’s too bad. Once I get my current Rails app up and fully functioning I’m going to switch to a host that specializes in Rails hosting, such as TextDrive.

4 comments

  1. Austin Mills / June 11, 2006

    I can understand wanting to move to a Rails-friendly provider, but couldn’t this problem be solved just by putting a redirect as the default page in the webroot? That way, the user could type in http://www.example.com and it would just get bounced to http://www.example.com/myRailsApp...

    –Austin

  2. dennis / June 11, 2006

    I wish it could. I should probably expand on my example. In the context of creating a user community with user pages such as mydomain.com/user1 and mydomain.com/user2 this introduces a bit of complexity. Maybe an apache forward or some sort of web script could be written to handle this, but it seems either way to be a hack. This probably sounds nitpicky, but I think it would be nice to keep the URLs clean. If you have any other suggestions I would love to hear them. Thanks.

  3. Paul Philippov / June 29, 2006

    Textdrive is great, but just in case you would like to try less expensive sollution have a look at http://www.railsplayground.com. I’m really happy with thier rails hosting, SVN and other features.

  4. dennis / June 29, 2006

    Paul,

    Thanks for the link and I’ll definitely look into it. It’s great to see more hosting options become available for Rails developers!

    Best Regards,
    Dennis

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