Prediction: thousands of shared web hosts will have Ruby by end of 2007 | Hacker News Reader

Prediction: thousands of shared web hosts will have Ruby by end of 2007

3 pointsvlad11 comments

By the end of 2007, web hosts will use the newly released CPanel 11, the most popular control panel for linux, which has one-click installers for Ruby and Ruby on Rails as well as Apache 2 support, and with a sudden influx of new users, exciting things will happen.

http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWHM/linux/cpanel11/integration.htm

Agree?

...exciting things will happen

Well, I'd like to believe that, but Dreamhost has had Ruby support for quite some time. I figured they're about the biggest of the shared hosting providers.

Maybe the new cPanel will make it even easier, though...

I think the "long tail" of shared hosting providers use CPanel, with no support for ruby. Including Ruby in CPanel means every Linux host will be able to offer it, and it also means that Ruby on Rails will become a standard, the same way PHP is. That's a huge difference from where Rails is at today. Most won't deploy it, but having built-in support for Perl, PHP, and Rails shows just how important the language is, even though most people outside startups don't use it currently.

Although, if somebody just wants a quick script, they will probably use PHP. Ruby on Rails is more for somebody who wants to create an entire database driven web-based application. So, maybe Ruby on Rails is a niche. What do you think?

If I just want a quick script, I'll just use Ruby without Rails. Plain erb. Or Nitro, or Merb. There are several options for using Ruby for Web apps/sites without having to take on the Rails stack.

Rails may be a niche tool, but it's not the only Web option for Ruby developers.

Your cup of Kool-aid is still full?!

I'm sipping. :)

When time permits I'll be looking at Scala.

Of course shared hosting will offer rails. Since it's more cpu intensive they'll be able to force you to upgrade to a virtual/dedicated server sooner because of violating their terms of service.

Hm, I'm not so sure. Rails doesn't do that well with shared setups at the moment.

Don't thousands of them offer it already?

Shared web hosting providers? I don't think so. I'd say in the low hundreds of all shared web hosts do, but not thousands. And of those, very few will offer any support. On the other hand, PHP comes with every single shared hosting installation that exists. I don't know of one that doesn't offer PHP support because it comes standard with... CPanel.

From PHP.net -- "Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers (estimated), and several million sites report as having it installed."

mediatemple has been offering ruby on rails for a while

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