Ask HN: How to deploy a [Ruby on Rails] site in a scalable way?

7 points

16 years ago

I have been working on my [first] startup for a month now, and while it's probably atleast one more month away from an alpha release, I want to know how to deploy it the right way. The site will have an initial high amount of load (network + CPU) for a new user, so I am thinking of having a separate server/queue for this initial process, so that it doesn't slow down the site for existing users.

Based on my research so far, I am currently leaning towards nginx + haproxy + unicorn/thin + memcached + mysql, and deploying on Linode. However, I have no prior experience in any of the above; hence I am hoping to tap the HN community's experience.

- Does the above architecture seem reasonable? Any suggestions/articles/books that you would recommend?

- Is Linode a good choice? Heroku/EY seem too expensive for me (atleast until I have enough revenue), but am I missing some other better option? MediaTemple?

- Any good suggestions on the load balancing architecture? I am still reading up on this.

- Is it better have 2 separate Rails server instances on 2 separate linodes, or running 1 instance on a linode of twice capacity (in terms of RAM/storage/bandwidth)? How many Linodes should I start with?

- Which Linux distribution should I choose (Linode offers 8 different ones - http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm)? Are there any relative [dis]advantages w.r.t. a Rails stack?

I apologize if any of my questions are stupid or contradictory; please attribute it to my inexperience.

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