What is Ruby on Rails ( RoR )?
Ruby on Rails 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, RoR 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 RoR 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 RoR 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 RoR developing and deploying brings with it (FastCGI, Mongrel, Capistrano, ActionMailer, .htaccess and environment.rb 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 servers optimized for RoR applications. We've been supporting and hosting Rails applications in a shared environment for over two years.
What web/application servers are available for RoR with HostingRails.com?
We use Apache2.2.x as the front end server to serve static content and offer the FastCGI application server as standard for serving dynamic content. We also sell dedicated memory to allow clients to start up Mongrel servers or LightTPD/Static FastCGI servers to which we will happily load-balance requests from Apache. Furthermore, clients with dedicated memory can also operate static BackgroundRB processes (like a dedicated ferret_server) or practically any other static process we're OK with.