Gizmoojo!

What do you do when you experienced sudden downtime with your webhost? You'll probably be busy firing out emails, or support forms to your hosting company and asking them what is wrong? How about conjuring up a "Sorry, we are down at the moment" page?. Yup, thats what I had to do when I found out that our hosting company Dreamhost (most probably have brought all the Rails site that were hosted on that particular machine down) were having some issues with RubyGems. One tip that I had just realized is when you are running a Rails site on a shared hosting environment, it would be a great idea to code that a "we're down" page and leave it in the public dir like "wearedown.html". And if in the event that your site is down with Rails/Ruby problem, all you have to do it is "cp wearedown.html index.html" and not have a plain ugly text only page like what Gizmoojo had (that would be March 29 2006 2:00pm EST). Of course, if you are using an index.html, then you would have had this problem in the first place. And of course, if the reason that the site is down is not a rails/ruby problem, than this tip would have helped at all too.

*Update to this: It appears that Dreamhost has decided to upgrade to Rails 1.1 and is causing outrage on all the rails site hosted as I had predicted. Why.. Why.. Why… Dreamhost…..What a way to piss of your Rails Customers.. Hinting: "I was actually going to consider getting a dedicated server from you guys when Gizmoojo launch but oh well.. my confidence just dropped" ****

*** How about some really good deals on your Dedicated Servers package for all your Rails customers because of this boo boo.
* More people blogging about their Dreamhost Outrage.

http://synthesis.sbecker.net/articles/2006/03/29/rails-1-1-keep-dreaming

* Dreamhost Blog has all the details and rants!!!