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I am a Ruby newbie. I am designing a web application and plan to use Ruby for coding. This project is for learning purpose but I want to host it live to see how it works. I plan to use PostgreSQL as back-end.

I want to know how to host a Ruby website. Which hosting service providers provide support for it? And I also want to know whether I should start with PostgreSQL or MySQL.

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up vote 4 down vote accepted

A good option for hosting Ruby web apps is Heroku. You can use the Rails, Ramaze, Sinatra, or Camping frameworks. For a small app it's free, but you can also purchase bigger hosting packages. Their system defaults to Postgres, but if you use MySQL or Sqlite on your development machine Heroku will automatically import it and convert to Postgres when you push to it. Pushing an app to Heroku is easy too, you just need to have a git repository and use a rubygem to push.

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If its a website, what framework are you using and what server do you plan to use with it.

A lot of Hosting services provide support of Ruby on Rails DreamHost, Rails Playground , Godaddy etc.

You can also go for VPS, Slicehost is great for that.

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Rails and Windows. –  RKh Oct 30 '09 at 20:27
If you are seriously thinking about Rails and Ruby. Though it does work with windows but please as a conscious choice move to Linux. It will save you a lot of trouble. –  Rishav Rastogi Oct 30 '09 at 20:52
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My suggestion: use a VPS

For a website hosted by a developer, I usually suggest a virtual private server. It's true that there are a number of hosting services that do have Ruby and RoR set up, for example: Engine Yard., and many others. However, these will have a commercial orientation and will be charging you for lots of things that a learning experience doesn't need.

Plus, what if you want to try Spring, or JRuby, or something else that's also non-LAMP? (Or, say you want LAMP+Ruby?) Now you might be even closer to enterprisey stuff with high prices for direct support, but on your VPS you can run whatever you want, you can have ssh access, you can run whatever versions you want, etc., etc..

Another thing to think about is Google App Engine. which is free in some cases. You can't run Active Record directly, as Bigtable is non-relational, but RoR is said to run.

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