I’ve not had time to do many blog posts lately, largely because I’ve been in the thick of getting my first business-critical Rails app ready to deploy. This application will serve a six-doctor medical practice by allowing patients to submit requests for appointments, referrals, prescription refills, and records transfers via the web. In addition to the public-facing site, there’s an admin site for the office staff to track and process the requests.

This site won’t be high-traffic on the scale of a general consumer site, but it needs to be robust and have very little downtime. The app itself is in pretty good shape, and I’ve been working on enhancing my hosting infrastructure. In particular, I’ve been working on:

• Moving from a single VPS to a staging VPS and a production VPS.
• Implementing SSL for secure pages.
• Automating frequent database backups.
• Installing monitoring software.

Since I haven’t come from a Unix background, along the way I’ve had to engage in a crash course in Linux system administration.

In the next few days, this application will be launched, and then I’ll have a series of posts describing what I learned in each of these areas. Stay tuned.