Hello,

I am still learning Rails and so far have only deployed to Heroku but thought trying to deploy to a service like Linode could help.

I have 1 rails app I would like to host on a Linode and also have a shared hsoting account with another host elsewhere which has a couple of PHP/MySQL based sites running on it.

Can anyone here give me some advice about how o get started. eg:

- What I need
- What OS to use
- How to get my rails app up and running
- How to get my PHP sites also up and running on the same linode (if this is at all possible)
- Anything else that could be useful.

Kind regards,
Neil

Your question is very broad. But I can answer a few bits of it (I'm not a Rails user).

The best setup (in my opinion) for PHP is to use Nginx and php-fpm. This enables you to have the PHP application run as a different user to the web server which gives you a slight security boost. This means that if anyone compromises your web server they still do not have write access to your PHP files.

As for OS that is entirely dependent on which one you are most comfortable with. Debian and Ubuntu seem to be the most commonly recommeneded so if you have no idea which to choose then choose one of those (if you choose Ubuntu Server make sure you use either version 10.04 or version 12.04 as these are the long term support releases).

If you do decide to go with Nginx I believe it is well supported in the Rails community so you shouldn't have many issues with that. You can use something like Thin or Mongrel to serve your Rails app and then just use Nginx to proxy back to it.

Oh and don't forget to configure your firewall and harden SSH as well .