Kablingy

I often hesitate to build trivial Rails applications. The reason is hosting. Sometimes the overhead of setting up a new virtual private server, securing it, and updating it regularly turns me off wanting to make the application in the first place. It costs time and money to pay for the server, which is an unpleasant cost to have to pass on the customer especially when the application is small.

Heroku has changed the game. If you want to write a very simple Rails (or indeed complex) application, you can deploy it for free to Heroku in no time. If you need a few extras such as hourly cron jobs, wildcard subdomains, then you can pay just for those features. There is substantially less fiddling around to be performed when deploying to Heroku.

I've deployed about 3 applications to Heroku, and it wasn't until the 3rd one that it became a smooth process. One does have to make adjustments to one's development environment such as hosting uploadable files on S3, running on Ruby 1.8.6, deploying to Postgres etc. It took quite a bit of jumping through hoops before I figured out how to deploy to Heroku effectively (so be warned)

But the net result is that yesterday I built and deployed a working tested Rails app from scratch for a customer in 1 day - definitely a record for me. 

Thanks Heroku and thanks to Darragh Curran, Declan McGrath, and Kevin Noonan for recommending it to me in the face of skepticism

(screenshot taken from www.heroku.com)