“David Heinemeier Hansson writes in detail”:www.loudthinking.com/posts/21-… on the problems with Rails in shared hosts:
"Most Rails contributors are not big users of shared hosting and they tend to work on problems or enhancements that'll benefit their own usage of the framework. You don't have to have a degree in formal logic to deduce that work to improve life on shared hosting is not exactly a top priority for these people, myself included."
Although I’ve been building Rails apps for a couple years, and will continue to do so, I made the choice with “Riverfold”:www.riverfold.com to go PHP-only so that I could deploy on inexpensive shared hosts and easily move my sites. Fact is, you need to dedicate a significant portion of your time to being a system administrator if you run a Rails site.
I find the general “we don’t owe you anything” attitude in the Rails community off-putting. What it means is quite simple: Rails is not a product, despite what it might look like when you “visit the web site”:www.rubyonrails.com/. This is fine and consistent with the opinionated nature of Rails (which from a design perspective is what makes Rails excellent), but it also means that features like backwards compatibility are not just ignored but actively discouraged. The message this sends is that the core team values their own personal productivity over the productivity of the general Rails userbase.
Also, make no mistake, the performance questions surrounding Rails are directly related to the web shared host issue. Rails can’t be hosted in the same way that PHP is hosted because it takes so long for a Rails application to be initialized, requiring dedicated long-running app instances and an ever-changing array of “best practice” solutions starting with mod_ruby to FCGI to Mongrel to “Thin”:code.macournoyer.com/thin/.
My friends and “co-workers”:www.vitalsource.com are no doubt sick of me bashing Rails (see “this post on the priorities of the community”:www.manton.org/2007/09/r…), but I still admire Rails and do want to see these problems solved. I would love to use “PotionStore”:www.potionfactory.com/potionsto… to power the Riverfold site, or to base my registration database and sales tracking in Rails.
