The past couple of years has witnessed the dramatic rise of Ruby on Rails, which has become one of the most preferred web application frameworks today. Consequently, Rails hosting has become a very fast growing, lucrative area. Also, strong developer interest in Rails has resulted in many hosting companies providing developer-friendly hosting environments with SVN, Trac etc which are proving to be very popular.

Though Rails and developer hosting is an extremely happening hosting sub-industry today, technical support in this area is a challenge since skill set requirements are unique and high. Especially considering the fact that the people you're servicing are mostly developers with extensive knowledge of the environment and the applications that run on them.

Understandably, technical support has been the make-or-break aspect of every company. Small companies have grown quickly to become industry leaders because of their skills in this area, whereas, established, reputable names failed because of lack of specialized know-how in this area.

InstaCarma has been working on Ruby on Rails for over 2 years, servicing some very reputable Developer hosting companies focused mainly on Rails. All this experience and knowledge has put us in a great position to deliver unmatched support services in this area.

What makes InstaCarma a good provider of Ruby on Rails/ developer hosting support ?

2+ Years experience with Ruby on Rails and developer hosting : This is a substantial amount of time considering Rails is a relatively new platform.

Client base contains leading names in Rails Hosting : Sample this - amongst the results google displays upon searching for Rails Hosting, 4 of our clients get listed in the first 2 pages. Need we say more ?

Specialized workforce : We're probably the only hosting support company that has specialist Ruby on Rails staff. We also conduct extensive training programmes inhouse with the help of reputed corporate trainers.

Great feedback : With numerous developers thanking us profusely for resolving deployment problems (in some cases coding conflicts as well), we're quite convinced about our abilities to help professional web developers get their applications working on hosting servers.

SKILLS : Ruby on Rails, Apache 2.2.x, FastCGI, Mongrel (single as well as clustered with load balancer), Lighttpd, Nginx, Monit, Litespeed, Capistrano, Subversion, Git, Trac, Bugzilla, Collaboa, Django, Typo, Mephisto, TurboGears

Most common tasks we perform for customers of Rails/Developer hosting companies :-

• Helping customers set up their account to use Rails
• Setting up the vhosts for the customer's site with required entries so that their application will run on mongrel.
• Starting up the mongrel instances for the client's application
• Making sure that all the mongrel instances are up after a server reboot.
• Setting up the vhosts for the customer's domain for SVN access.
• Making necessary ownership changes on SVN repositories so that it can be edited via HTTP or SVN+SSH.
• Setting up the vhosts for the customer's domain for Trac access and helping them set up admin privileges.
• Helping customers use Capistrano with their SVN repository
• Helping customers use Django
• Deploying applications for customers

A key reason behind our success as a Ruby on Rails hosting support provider is our specialized workforce who're trained and skilled on the platform. They're system administrators with strong programming talent and skill, so they have the ability to help customers troubleshoot deployment issues and get their web applications online. They can understand code, errors, and can even help developers resolve minor coding issues to some extent.

• Action mailer, ar_sendmail, BackgroundRB, Ferret, Active record, caches_action and expire_action , active scaffold subform menus and more.
• Restful application development using Named Routes and Rest conventions
• Use of Helper classes for effective Model, View segregation.
• Use of FormHelper classes for establishing Model communication via view.
• Knowledge of Ruby programming language.
• Knowledge of Partials, Templates,Caching and cache storage and usage of yield function for effective content presentations.
• Knowledge of the Rails Generator:Login Generator, SaltedHashLogin Generator
• Usage of the ActiveRecord associations such as has-many and belongs-to relationship.
• Usage and implementing the Action Mailer in applications
• Usage of sessions, setting and disabling the session using the process_cgi, process controller and via an environment file.
• Basic knowledege of SubVersion Numbering concepts such as Checkout, Branching and Merging
• Deploying Rails application on the servers using Capistrano
• Knowledge of ActiveRecord validations
• Usage of Filter Classes for pre and post processing of codes.