I've had my Rails Machine for about two weeks now, just enough time for me to confirm that I am truly infatuated with it.  I really am impressed with the whole package from top to bottom, and it's a perfect match to the brilliance of the Rails framework and Capistrano .  Like Jamis said in the Capistrano Mailing List...


I couldn't agree more.  Here's a quick rundown of the good and bad of my experience thus far.

Setup

If I could give one piece of advice for setting up your Rails Machine , it would be to follow their instructions and conventions very closely.  I was stubborn and wanted to do things my way, but I quickly realized that this wasn't worth the effort.  This isn't just cause it's difficult to configure, but when you're asking for help you wont have to explain your own cockamamie setup.  

My first major problem came when I realized I deleted the original root password before I reset the MySql root password.  You see I was going through the security setup on my phone while waiting in line for pizza at D'Bronx, and I somehow managed to miss that last step.  It didn't take me long to find a way to reset the password, and be on my way.

All in all it went very well, and I had great support throughout.

Deployment

Capistrano is flat out awesome, and Rails Machine makes it even better.  Deployment is as easy as 'cap -a deploy'.  What it does is checks out the latest release to a new directory and symlinks it to a directory named 'current'.  It keeps the old releases so you can always 'cap -a rollback'.  

I quickly ran into a problem though.  You see I'm using file_column to upload images, and it stores these images in the public folder.  The problem is that since Capistrano checks the code out from Subversion each deploy, you lose the images.  Soon I found a block of code to add to my deploy.rb that allowed me to put these images in the shared directory, and it would automatically symlink link it in the current directory after deployment.  

I was happy with this solution but I was even happier when I found out from the Capistrano Mailing List, that the Rails Machine recipe allows "set :app_symlinks, %w{media}".  Damn, they already thought of it.

Performance

This has to be the best part of the whole deal.  It continues to impress me how fast everything is running.  They have come up with the perfect configuration for running Ruby on Rails applications.  The system is optimized to run 6 Mongrel instances, and you can run a single app on more than one.  It defaults to two instances, but I went ahead and bumped it up to 4.  This was super easy and seamless by the way.

I'm not sure what kind of pipe they're on, but it's fast enough that I don't have to.

Price

The price is probably the only downside.  I got the BantamVPS , which is reasonable, but I could get the same hardware setup for cheaper elsewhere.  I still went with Rails Machine because of their stack and their experience with deploying and running Ruby on Rails.  It's a VPS with root access, but it comes with MySql, Mongrel, Apache and Subversion already setup.  I setup my old server and it did the job, but there comes a time when you have to decide whether it's worth your time to be dorking around with this stuff.  

Support

Their superior support makes it worth every penny.  I've dropped into the Campfire Chatroom quite a few times and Bradley or David have been more than helpful.  I like being on a personal level with the guys that really know the servers.  I remember one time I had to call the support at 1and1, and I got some guy that could barely understand me and had no idea what I was talking about.  I'm very impressed with their responsiveness and level of knowledge in both Rails and System Administration in general.

Expandability

The reason I wanted a VPS is that we have no idea if DoodleKit is going to have 10 users, or 10 bagillion.  We can go with a modest setup for now, but if we get a good response and need more resources we can just upgrade the server without having to reconfigure everything.  Apparently they can upgrade from BantamVPS to the BigVPS in about 15 minutes.  They also offer a clustered setup and custom configurations, which is good to know for when we get 100 bagillion users.

Summary

I can't say it enough, I love my Rails Machine .  If you have a critical Rails application and are looking for the freedom of root access with the support of some dudes that really know what they're doing, then Rails Machine is for you. I'm excited about DoodleKit (coming soon), and Rails Machine gives me confidence that it now has the infrastructure it needs to succeed.  

Now I need a cool Rails Machine banner to put in my sidebar.