Is Ruby on Rails supported by most hosts?

Question

I'm considering shifting from PHP to Rails. Does an average web host support the Ruby language and everything that Rails needs? Does a normal Rails app using MySQL or does it handle data differently? And is it as "easy" to get an app up and running, as PHP?

Answer 1

I'm considering shifting from PHP to Rails. Does an average web host support the Ruby language and everything that Rails needs?

I would say yes. I can't be certain if your "average" host will support it, but there are thousands that do, so you'll have a wide variety to choose from.

Does a normal Rails app using MySQL or does it handle data differently?

You can use MySQL, which is common, as well as other DB systems, and it won't affect your code since it uses a DBA layer.

And is it as "easy" to get an app up and running, as PHP?

Depends on your platform, but yes :)

Answer 2

Does an average web host support the Ruby language and everything that Rails needs?

No. Many hosts have still to come on board with this. If you're looking for cheap shared hosting, I'd suggest http://railsplayground.com/

Does a normal Rails app using MySQL or does it handle data differently?

Rails is database agnostic. You can connect to SQLITE, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and more.

And is it as "easy" to get an app up and running, as PHP?

Subjective. I'd say no. If you're looking for painless rails deployment with Apache or nginx I'd have to suggest using Phusion Passenger aka modrails.

Answer 3

No, the average shared webhost provider does not because most are preconfigured with LAMP and Ruby usually isn't installed, but RoR support is on the rise.

However, if you're interested in a dedicated/vps (unmanaged) then you pretty much can do whatever you want ( I would recommend slicehost/linode if you are looking for a vps and your budget is around $20/mo ).

A decent web application ( ROR ) can handle many types of DBMS's including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite.

What's your budget? How big will your site be?

Answer 4

I'd recommend checking with the host themselves before subscribing/purchasing the plan, but most hosts are starting to support rails.

Answer 5

The short answer is that while a lot of web hosting providers do support Ruby on Rails, it is not as many as support PHP simply because PHP has been around a lot longer and is more established.

That being said, it is not hard to find a provider that does.

A lot of Rails applications use MySQL so support for that is very strong, but there are easy options for Postgres and many other popular RDBMS platforms. Rails does handle MySQL data differently because there is ActiveRecord, the Object Relational Mapper (ORM), which simplifies a lot of the SQL calls you need to make into standard Ruby operations. PHP has similar frameworks, such as CakePHP, but these are not as commonplace.