I've never used Rails or Heroku, so I have a question - how many companies can depend on deploying to Heroku? Is it really flexible enough? As long as you don'

I've never used Rails or Heroku, so I have a question - how many companies can depend on deploying to Heroku? Is it really flexible enough? As long as you don't write to the file system, and you don't need non-web, non-worker, non-cron server processes, you're probably OK on Heroku. You also have to be willing to trust Amazon and Salesforce, which isn't too big a stretch in many industries. Their WebSocket support is still in beta, and it's not clear whether it supports Comet on non-WebSocket browsers: http://addons.heroku.com/pusher http://addons.heroku.com/pusher On the other hand, if you need to respond to ZeroMQ messages, or if you need to poll S3 every 5 seconds, Heroku's just not going to work for you. In that case, you can either toss everything onto a server running Phusion Passenger, or set up a real deployment infrastructure with Chef (or Puppet). This can take up to 2 days for a sufficiently messy project, assuming you want to fully automate everything, and I agree that's it's not fun. (Edit: Chef provides pre-packaged deployment instructions for Apache, Unicorn, Rails, ha_proxy, a database, etc. This takes a couple of days to work through the tutorials and set everything up. The setup is a bit of a drag, but it's sweet once everything is working.)