There’s the usual problems with “you get what you pay for” - a $9.95/mo account isn’t going to nessecarily have amazing realibility (there was a month when I was ready to shoot TextDrive because the system reliability was so crappy) - but the functionality was all there. Since you focused on Rails, I’ll assume you’re headed more in that direction for your own interests, but if you’d like to talk specifics about setup and operation of Django based sites, I’d be more than happy to share with you.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how it is implemented, but I know a container is a sort of a stripped down virtual machine (e.g. you have very little control over the environment or software it runs within, which is a good thing in terms of them managing security updates & so forth).

Essentially you get a guaranteed allocation of memory, CPU & bandwidth for your container, with all the Unix server configuration and processes hidden from your container. The only thing in your container that you can see is the actual Rails applications.

Engine Yard does something similar.

If they can pull it off, surely DreamHost can as well, or perhaps DreamHost doesn’t have the engineering resources to do it if it isn’t bog standard Apache style hosting - Who knows.

@Abundance: Thanks for the tip — I’ve just watched “WebFaction”:http://www.webfaction.com/ ‘s screencasts and their support for Rails and other app servers looks amazing. I’m very tempted to sign up.

I have to take the opportunity  to plug WebFaction as a satisfied customer. They do hosting for all manner of dynamic languages, (including Python/PHP/Rails) Subversion, etc. Their latest service modifications to allow unlimited domains, websites, pro…

There exists an Apache module called mod_ruby, which works similarly to mod_python, mod_perl, or mod_php. The reason it is not used in production is because of the open nature of the Ruby language. In Ruby, one can open existing classes and change their behavior, even in the core classes. Because applications may freely modify the core classes (or any other classes, for that matter), and because the environment is long-lived, it opens up a Pandora’s box of security and compatibility problems. There have been some attempts to solve that problem though, and allow a Ruby process to be shared without having to share the execution environment. Google “ruby sandbox” for some examples. It certainly is a solvable problem, but unfortunately, the solution just hasn’t been created yet.

(I am both a Dreamhost subscriber and a Rails developer, however, I avoid running any Rails applications on Dreamhost)

You mentioned that Python suffers the same fate. However, Python (including Django) can use mod_python.