I have been hosting on Westhost for a little over four years now with no major complaints and I also host the majority of my clients there. They offer a lot of options for very little money and are always adding new features to the accounts. Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails is not one of them… yet.
As I have begun working a bit more with Rails, I have been looking to get it installed on my server (as well as some of my clients’). One of the major half-truths of Rails evangelism is the ease of install, especially with a host running Apache 1.3. After doing a few rather painful installs myself for some new projects, I finally decided to document the process of installing Ruby on Rails at Westhost for my own knowledge and to help any others who may be trying to do the same. Hopefully, Westhost will soon start to offer Rails installs as part of their hosting packages, but, until then, I offer up this humble tutorial.