Slashcode

Does anyone have a site working on Dreamhost using slashcode?

Crush your enemy and see them driven before you...

Could be wrong, of course, but my understanding is slashcode requires mod_perl, but DH's shared servers do not have it.

Regards,

BobS

Thanks, I will ask them.

Crush your enemy and see them driven before you...

Slashcode won't work (check the forum archives too), however Nuke, Nope, and a number of other clones will work fine, and will probably be easier to setup and faster than Slashcode for a site that's not super high traffic.

There's a kbase article on why we don't support mod_perl on shared hosting plans if you're interested.

>There's a kbase article on why we don't support mod_perl on shared hosting plans if you're interested.

Yeah, what I said:

In reply to:

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DH's shared servers do not have it (https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=2446).

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Cheers,

BobS

It's always mildly irritated me that we have mod_php (does that exist?) but no mod_perl. I've had to exclude several software packages because of that.

I notice that the kb article is about a year old now. Has anything changed in the last 12 months either with mod_perl or Dreamhost) that might make it more viable?

Thanks,
Zilch

We have nothing against mod_perl; we like mod_perl and use it extensively. We used to offer it for shared hosting plans.

However, there are a lot of reasons that it simply doesn't work well in a shared hosting environment. I think you will find very few webhosts that offer mod_perl (or even FastCGI) in a similar environment.

Your best bet is to wait a few months, if not years, for mod_perl2 to become stable and mainstream. That's got a lot better memory management to make sure that one customer on a shared hosting plan doesn't bring down the whole machine for others. I think that's the main challenege of offering mod_perl on a shared server.

To be honest, I wouldn't want mod_perl to be enabled because of this. The amount of people who just throw up scripts onto their sites without really knowing what they're doing would be a massive headache if mod_perl was installed. And I'm sure I wouldn't like to be on the same machine as someone who keeps taking up all the machine's memory because of this. Better fork out for a dedicated server ...

- wil

Here's what the Mod_perl mailing list had to say about the Dreamhost policy:

* http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/modperl/2167178

All the other hosting companies suggested (that "support" mod_perl) are tiny. As in, run by some kid in his mother's basement:

http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/hub.org
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/jupiterhost.net
http://www.webhosting.info/webhosts/reports/total_domains/GOSSAMERHOST.COM

Now, about runninng mod_php and not mod_perl, and how that relates to our cluefullness: For how idiotic PHP is, mod_php was at least designed with shared hosting in mind. mod_perl wasn't.

As for the hosts who give each mod_perl customer a whole Apache, with all the massive overhead that implies, see the number of domains they host at the links above. They are not in the same business we are.

If you absolutley need to run mod_perl, get a dedicated server.


nate.

That's very interesting. I was feeling sorry for those little guys (hub.org especially), until I looked at DH and the Top Web Hosts Worldwide. Wildwestdomains gained about as many domains over the last 3 weeks as DH has total (~70,000). OTOH, DH gained about twice as many transferred from wildwest as they lost transferred to wildwest. But that's only 54 versus 25. It's all relative. :-)

Cheers,

BobS

I responded to one of the posts in that thread (in this message: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/modperl/2176383) just to try and clarify our position here. I'll see about updating the kbase to be more clear... we're not saying that mod_perl itself is bad (quite the contrary - our whole web panel is written in mod_perl) - however the fact that poorly written code can cause problems in a shared hosting environment means that (in our opinion) mod_perl isn't well suited for use in that environment.

Anything where one user's actions can potentially take down literally hundreds of other sites is something we like to avoid.

Also, we simply can't support everything we'd like to support, or everything that some users want... if anything, I think we're maybe too nice about this sometimes already. While features are important (and bring in new customers / make existing customers happy), ideally we'd like to strike a balance here - providing useful features AND providing reliable and stable service... maybe tilted a bit towards the latter.

Wildwest, Register.com and the like aren't really hosting companies, they're registrars.

The biggest real host by far is schlund.de/1and1.com. I can't imagine how much money they spend on marketing 1and1 here (esp w/ how many accounts they gave away without even getting a credit card). And Yahoo's pretty big. Both of them are still growing. A lot of the older big guys are hemorrhaging customers.


nate.