What is Ruby on Rails?
Ruby on Rails ("Rails", "RoR") is a web development framework that helps you build sites faster, cleaner, and with less code. Constructed on top of the elegant scripting language Ruby, Rails allows the developer to build database-driven (or even static) websites enjoyably "from scratch" or by utilizing thousands of easily installable gems and plugins that Rails enthusiasts have already developed to do pretty much any aspect of web development you can think of.
How can I use Ruby on Rails to build a website?
There are a ton of excellent tutorials out there, but essentially to get started you just need to SSH into your shell's command line and issue a "rails app_name" and it will create a directory ("app_name") full of all the RoR goodness you'll come to love. Fill in your models, views, and controllers and you're ready to roll.
How is Ruby on Rails hosting better with HostingRails.com vs. other hosts?
We're Rails enthusiasts who started HostingRails.com because we could not find affordable hosts "back in the day" (i.e. 2005) who could support Rails much beyond just having it installed. There are tons of coding, configuration, and development questions that Ruby on Rails developing and deploying brings with it (Passenger, Mongrel, Capistrano, ActionMailer, environment.rb, routes.rb, full-text search daemon servers, initializer settings, etc...) that requires not only knowledgeable support staff who can answer these questions and fix them, but systems administrators who have ample experience handling shared and dedicated servers optimized for Ruby on Rails applications. We've been supporting and hosting Rails applications in a shared environment for over three years and have helped tons of clients scale up to VPS and multi-server dedicated solutions.
What web/application servers are available for Ruby on Rails with HostingRails.com?
We use Apache2.2.x as the front end server to serve static content and offer Passenger as the standard for serving dynamic content. We also allow clients to start up Mongrel/Thin servers or LightTPD/Static FastCGI servers to which we will happily load-balance requests. Furthermore, clients can also operate static BackgroundRB processes (like a dedicated sphinx or ferret server) or practically any other static process we're OK with.