[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="80" caption="The Ronin package from Heroku"][/caption] I wanted to brag on Heroku, a new type of webhost for Ruby on Rails (and other Ruby framework) web applications. I had been spending 2 days trying to get a good staging* server setup. Heroku solved all my problems, and I haven't even paid for anything yet!

What's different about Heroku

• You add to your website by typing 'git push heroku'.  The next best option was almost as easy ('cap deploy') but only after you set everything up right (takes time).
• No database setup.
• They create a big copy of your website so that it can be rapidly replicated if traffic increases.
• The intro version is free!

Their price goes up as your use resources.  I'm just getting started with it, so I can't testify to it's long term performance or it's performance for high-traffic applications.  But it looks like a great application for starting small and scaling up seamlessly. *What is a staging server?  It's a website almost identical to your real website, where you can try out changes first to make sure the new changes are both approved and don't break anything.