It's really a question of how you value your own time. If you want to get up and running fast, and keep it that way. Go for Heroku with S3. Enabling S3 file up

It's really a question of how you value your own time. If you want to get up and running fast, and keep it that way. Go for Heroku with S3. Enabling S3 file uploads is pretty straight with most rails plugins. Expect to spent money on everything: storage, dynos, database, mailing, S3, SSL, etc. If you are on a tight budget, go with a VPS. But keep in mind that _you_ will need to setup the server, install ruby and a database server. Setup something like capistrano for deployments. Make backups. Secure your server. It's very time consuming. So, as with everything, it's a trade-off.