07 Jan 2008, Posted by Jo Hund in Ruby/Rails, 0 Comments

Litespeed: The best kept Rails deployment secret

There is a great way to deploy rails applications. I know it is being used on some high traffic production deployments. How come it never gets mentioned in any official Rails documentation?

Litespeed is its name. It is free — not open source though. And that may be the reason why you don’t hear much about it in the Rails community.

Why I like it?

1. Super simple deployment. No mongrels, monit, or apache. Litespeed replaces all three of them: It has the front end, load balancer, and manages its own Ruby processes.
2. Nice GUI for system management: server configuration, control, and updates are all handled through a super simple and sleek UI.
3. It is free to use for most small to medium scale web apps. You pay for the “Enterprise” version.
4. Small memory footprint. Gives you more apps per MB of RAM on your server. That translates directly into saved hosting dollars and makes for snappier apps.

usefuljaja has a bunch of tutorials covering litespeed.