Okay, before you guys go nuts -- this is just a small site, temporary setup. Right now I'm having some internal folks remote into the server and use the site through webrick via the dev command: ruby script/server. Not exactly ideal.
I'm just starting Rails dev and I want to know a better way to handle hosting on a Windows Pro box. Again, just temporary so please be gentle :)
As far as I know, mod_rails isn't an alternative.
Mongrel plays very nice on windows, though, so you can set up a few mongrels and have IIS or Apache proxy to them. Or just use Mongrel directly. Before mod_rails, mongrel was the de facto way to deploy on any platform, so it's a very viable choice.
The one time I was forced to deploy on Windows, however, I installed Ubuntu via virtualbox (could also use VMWare or whatever, of course) and deployed on that. Works like a dream, and I got to work with a sensible OS. Phew. SSH and stuff. Can't live without it. Remote desktop isn't exactly my kind of thing.
Your best bet is to setup a Mongrel cluster. Mongrel is an application server which can serve a Rails application on HTTP. But a single Mongrel instance can only handle 1 request at the same time, so typically people run a cluster of Mongrels, i.e. multiple Mongrel instances. These Mongrel instances do not talk to the Internet directly. Instead, they are put behind a load balancer or a web server, which proxies requests to this cluster of Mongrels. If you use Apache on Windows then you can: 1. Setup and start a cluster of Mongrels, each listening on its own port. 2. Setup a virtual host with some mod_proxy_balancer directives, with which you tell mod_proxy_balancer to proxy all requests to the Mongrel cluster. mod_proxy_balancer will automatically distribute the load between the Mongrels.
If usage is really low i.e. likely to be mostly 1 person at a time or your response time is really low then you can get away with a single mongrel and having your users point there browser to the relevent IP address and port.
For some time before I finally got my apps migrated to our corporate Linux/apache "cloud" (which was anything but straightforward, for mostly internal IT-related reasons) I ran two apps on a workstation, using a separate mongrel (different ports) for each. It worked well enough to be useful for almost a year.
These days (well, about three weeks now) I've substituted the immediacy, control - and vulnerability - of local (under my desk) access for the stability of five servers, each with multiple mongrels, staging areas, and deployment annoyances. Swings and roundabouts.