FWIW: MediaTemple is a reasonable choice. They give you quite a lot of cpu time on VE servers. I say you spend 30 bucks and try the cheapest option. Never trie

FWIW: MediaTemple is a reasonable choice. They give you quite a lot of cpu time on VE servers. I say you spend 30 bucks and try the cheapest option. Never tried linode/heroku though. I found performance of thin in multithreading mode (with appropriate rails settings) quite promising and having low memory footprint. No need to load balance on a single instance since it handles everything cluster would (NB: 1.9+ ruby only). As far as I understand, the best way to load-balance is to give one task per server at a time and keep other tasks in waiting queue. Linux distribution are a matter of taste imho. I always go with ubuntu since it's easier to set up.