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Why would an ISP not offer up-to-date Ruby support?

2 points| mud_dauber | 12 years ago | reply

I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not spite.

Just tried to create a Rails app on Dreamhost, only to learn that they only support Ruby 1.8.7 on shared server accounts. It's my understanding that v1.8.7 is very obsolete if not entirely deprecated. If so, I'm a bit perplexed why a major ISP, with prominent mention of Ruby & Rails support in their wiki, wouldn't want to keep up.

Am I missing something?

6 comments

[+] atmosx|12 years ago|reply

Because for them, probably the cost of maintaining rails applications out of the box, is bigger then the approximate gain of offering an up-to-date ruby installation on their servers.

I don't feel like 'Dreamhost' is prominent in the Ruby community. Actually I'm the ruby mailing lists and at least 6 ruby-related IRC channels (I don't do Rails yet, I'm more of a Sinatra afficionado). I never seen ONCE dreamhost mentioned there.

Even on rails website[1], the recommendations are: Heroku, Rails Machine, Brightbox, Engine Yard for hosting, Rackspace (hosting rails website IIRC) or Linode.

[1] http://rubyonrails.org/deploy

[+] viraptor|12 years ago|reply

The wiki says "You can use rbenv or rvm to install other ruby versions on DreamHost". I guess they just don't care enough to upgrade system-wide, or have some internal issues that hake it harder than expected.

Also, they're your hosting provider, not ISP. Your ISP provides you access to the internet.

[+] mud_dauber|12 years ago|reply

Apparently using rvm to upgrade requires sudo access. I'd have to upgrade for that. Also, tks for the hosting provider v. ISP clarification.

[+] taf2|12 years ago|reply

More likely it's simply the default because it is still the default in many Linux distros

[+] gary4gar|12 years ago|reply

DreamHost is mostly used for LAMP stack. you might want to Use heroku which offers first-class ruby support.

    https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/ruby

[+] mud_dauber|12 years ago|reply

Thanks - much appreciated. I've used Heroku to test a couple of "hello world" apps, but was hoping to use DreamHost's shared server account in order to learn the tricks of deployment for myself.