Hello Sascha,


SE> It is my opinion that Textdrive already does what you want for 12$ a
SE> month. 12$ a month for this kind of hosting sounds to me like pro bono
SE> project already. I don't believe they can be profitable with that. To
SE> earn money with that kind of fee structure you would need thousands of
SE> customers and hope they don't call too often.

With a complex and still immature infrastructure like rails this will
happen. Be sure about it.

SE> I think what you are looking for is a community project with fundings
SE> from a bigger investor / hoster. Even than it would be very difficult.
SE> And if it were funded you shouldn't need to pay even 1$ ;)

The question is why should they give fundings ?

What is the benefit for a company or NGO ? You can maybe get some
goverment sponsoring for putting people online but surely not for
technical geeks - even i would complain about this tax payers waste of
money.

SE> 1$ per Rails app per month, I think this is not even financialy viable
SE> in India or China.

:-)
Ever tried internet hosting or access in this countries ?

<language-alert> It's so fucking expensive. </language-alert>

Around 1000 US$ for a 10MBit line per monthThis countries only have a
price advantage for simple uneducated work. I tried to setup an IT
company in Thailand once and quickly gave up.

SE> If you ask me I would not do it under 40-50$ per month per account.
SE> Otherwise I wouldn't know how to turn a enough profit to pay everyone
SE> involved. Everything else would be a donation based community project
SE> which is not to be confused with "hosting".

Yes 100% Ack. I posted this before and i repeat myself here:

Ruby and Rails cost money. They are not a mass product and so ther
will be never be free hosting (acceptable quality). It's the same as
with java in the past. Maybe in 10 years with Rite3000
(Ruby 3.0) the interpreter is optimized enough to do this but not now.

-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's