If so .. bravo ! I’ve tried and failed to do it manually in the past – it would be great to hear that someone has got it working.

I decided to use the mongrel configuration at webfaction for now. When I am ready for production, I will have them setup a VPS for me.

Thanks again for all the details.
Regards, Ram

As far as memory is concerned, you have to work within the constraints of rails’ overhead memory usage and the memory required by your particular application. Overhead is the amount of memory required per rails instance running a skeleton rails application. Memory usage permitting, you can certainly run multiple rails apps on WebFaction. I’d advise you to take a look at the memory usage on your development machine and choose your plan accordingly. My script sets up two thin instances for the sample app, but for your purposes you may only need one thin instance per app.

Regarding your first enumerated question, it’s trivial to run multiple applications on “the same nginx”. You will have to duplicate the vhost configuration and make some small changes. For starters, you would create a “new app listening on port” from the WebFaction control panel. Take note of the port assigned to you. Duplicate the vhost file provided by the script and change the listening port to the port just assigned to you. Change the application path to the path of the new application in the vhost config file. Change the upstream socket paths to correspond with the new rails application’s thin sockets. You’ll also have to duplicate the info in the monitrc file that defines the thin servers for the first app and make sensible changes to reflect your new app. The last thing to do is to reload the nginx configuration and reload the monit configuration. (The quick and easy way is to kill nginx and quit monit, then start monit.)

In response to your second enumerated question, you cannot (should not) use Passenger on WebFaction. Technically you could, but you’ll have to run your own instance of Apache, which negates the memory benefits of Passenger. The only enviable benefit of Passenger from my perspective is its ability to start up/tear down rails instances on demand. Although I’ve tried Passenger on my development machine, there has been no compelling reason for me to make the switch.

After exhaustive research, I chose WebFaction for production. The alternative choice was SliceHost VPS. Both companies are exceptional. The deciding factor was that I didn’t want to maintain an entire Linux system. If you are passionate about Passenger, you might want to check out DreamHost. In my experience, the monit/nginx/thin stack is a good one.