With Phusion Passenger, a Ruby environment is just as easy to setup these days as PHP. Back when Heroku first started, I don't think Phusion Passenger existed.

With Phusion Passenger, a Ruby environment is just as easy to setup these days as PHP. Back when Heroku first started, I don't think Phusion Passenger existed. However, the point of these services isn't necessarily to save the developer from having to setup these environments, but rather it's to save the developer from worrying about having to setup a solid, scalable production setup. You still should have a development setup which lives somewhere other than Heroku.