It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the web generally speaking. Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails

It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the web generally speaking. Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails and it's infrastructure that costs a lot of money. Examples: Remote Backups every 24 hours. That means a server in a different data center, the bandwidth, and the work involved in setting up and managing the backups. Remote website monitoring. That means a server in a different data center hitting the site to make sure nothing is down. Money and time to deal with that. Database replication. A large PITA is taken care of on your choice of MySQL 4/5 or PostgreSQL 8.2. If you add that together, the price doesn't seem as steep. Database replication means two boxes. The offsite backup adds another box and you could always stick the offsite monitoring on that same box. So, now you're at three boxes and I don't think it's crazy to be spending $300 on three boxes. Of course, with EngineYard, you don't have to do any of the setup work and you have the ability to scale more easily. In that setup, there is no load balancer so as you need more capacity, you then have to deal with a load balancer as well as another application server. The price is a bit of a premium, but not as much as you might think. Mostly, it's just more than what most developers are used to. I'm used to setting myself up on a slicehost slice. I don't have database replication, offsite monitoring, offsite backups, or hardware redundancy. If that box kicks, my site goes down until they can get it running on another box. It hasn't happened to me and I've been a customer for over a year, but it is a possibility. EngineYard is about eliminating those possibilities. That's expensive, but if you're trying to deploy a site that is your business and not your hobby, you should probably look at EngineYard. EngineYard is about being able to tell potential investors that they don't have to worry about architecture - and have the goods to back it up. I'm a decent sysadmin, but not like people for whom it's there job. I can get Apache, mod_rails, mongrel, nginx, etc. up and running, but sometimes you just want to know that things are set up solidly from people who have a lot more experience than you do.