It’s great to see so many Railers sign up with TextDrive. They’re a great host and I’m happy to be associated with them. But unfortunately, it appears that there’s some mismatch in expectations around what you get for a $12 plan.

What you do get is a slice of very reasonable specs on some great machines. What you don’t get is your personal system administrators. You should have your shit together before pushing it to TextDrive. Develop on your local machine, push to TextDrive when it works.

As explained, TextDrive is a shared host. That means its somewhat like a community park where everyone is responsible for cleaning up after their visit and behave with good manners. Think of your application as a park goer. Make sure its recently well-behaved by not taxing everyone else with needlessly sloppy queries or tough computations on every request.

Most importantly, though, is to be mindful about your support requests. As nice as it would be, the TextDrive system administrators can’t be part of your development effort debugging your application. They’re there in case the system as such is broke. So just like programmers should be careful before blaming the operating system for their program troubles, you should be careful before blaming TextDrive for yours.

TextDrive is a marvelous service. You get SSH, Rails, lighttpd, FastCGI, MySQL, SVN, PostgreSQL, and so much more for twelve dollars a month. 12. On top of that, they’re taking half of the profit from that to help Rails. I’d hate to see such a resource go away because unreasonable support requests and sloppy apps.

Let’s avoid The Tragedy of The Commons. Thanks.