Switchtower is awesome, but can be a pain to configure on shared hosting services like TextDrive.

Installation on my dev machine was easy, but when it came time to run "rake deploy" I kept getting remote server errors.

I spent 30 minutes tracking down the problem. For TextDrive (and I assume other shared hosts), make sure you have the following line in your config/deploy.rb file:

set :restart_via, :run

The reason is that Switchtower defaults to using "sudo" to run certain commands, which is not possible on a shared hosting service.