Should i stay out of rails if a client has a cheap hosting service with a provider that do not support mod_rails? Will rails + fast.cgi provide a good experience for a user or should I choose, in this scenario, php + my-favorite-framework as platform ?
Regards,
Victor
Fastcgi should be fine. Though it has been generally recommended to host rails apps on a platform that you own. There are some pretty affordable virtual private servers out there that let you do this.
I would tend to avoid FastCGI. I haven't used it myself but I've read enough horror stories about it to never want to.
If the hosting company is going to be completely responsible for managing the server instance and you can trust them to be the ones who will make sure the app is always up and running, then maybe it would work. I doubt this is the case though, and if you don't own the servers I think you'll run into a lot of problems troubleshooting the all the weird bugs FastCGI will inevitably throw at you.
My experience on low end hosts was really really bad. Constantly having my mongrel instances die inexplicably. Since switching to a slice I have had zero problems running it on my own.
I have three clients on inexpensive hosting plans using FastCGI and have not run into any issues due to FastCGI itself. These are all low traffic sites where Mongrel was not necessary.
Will rails + fast.cgi provide a good experience for a user
It all depends on what you're trying to do. If you're going to build a site where users will uploading and playing video then no FastCGI is not a good choice.
or should I choose, in this scenario, php + my-favorite-framework as platform
You always choose the right tool for the job. Without any details on what you are trying to build I'm not sure anyone here will be able to tell you how to build it.
Don't worry about mod_rails: it's new and Rails sites were running fine before it turned up. It's nice to have, I'm sure, but not a necessity.
By the time you're looking to get rails to scale to volumes that really need mod_rails, the site should be worth putting into an environment that runs it.