Because for them, probably the cost of maintaining rails applications out of the box, is bigger then the approximate gain of offering an up-to-date ruby install

Because for them, probably the cost of maintaining rails applications out of the box, is bigger then the approximate gain of offering an up-to-date ruby installation on their servers. I don't feel like 'Dreamhost' is prominent in the Ruby community. Actually I'm the ruby mailing lists and at least 6 ruby-related IRC channels (I don't do Rails yet, I'm more of a Sinatra afficionado). I never seen ONCE dreamhost mentioned there. Even on rails website[1], the recommendations are: Heroku, Rails Machine, Brightbox, Engine Yard for hosting, Rackspace (hosting rails website IIRC) or Linode. [1] http://rubyonrails.org/deploy http://rubyonrails.org/deploy