I think Java deployment is pretty straightforward and php is dead simple. I guess it depends on how much traffic your site gets but the larger your Rails site

I think Java deployment is pretty straightforward and php is dead simple. I guess it depends on how much traffic your site gets but the larger your Rails site gets the more moving parts you end up with (at a lot less traffic than say a Java stack), higher server specs, reliance on memcache, some proxy, etc. just for a standard dynamic website. Sure you can wrap that deployment dance into a Capistrano recipe but it's not inherently simple. But the main point is that since Rails/Ruby requires a lot more resources (cpu, ram, etc.) and wraps a lot up into a black box (auto-generated queries that might have a deadly join or two), when you deploy it's more "thrilling" for want of a better word. I'm not saying Rails sucks completely, but the programmer productivity thing is oversold because in a small shop, the dev guys are usually babysitting servers too. This and some whimsical api changes can dampen your enthusiasm a bit. I just wanted to emphasize that some Rails enthusiasts are zealously in a state of denial of Rails/Ruby short-comings and putting a Rails app in production/deployment can be a bit challenging. Like others have said, the number of startups focused on making deployment and scaling of Rails apps "easy" kind of says something.