Engine Yard has made it easier to try their Ruby cloud platform AppCloud: the first 500 hours are free of charge:
[..] Pick one of your current Rails/Sinatra/Rack applications and try it on AppCloud for free. [..] Once you create your new AppCloud account, you can launch your application(s) on a High-CPU instance with 2 virtual cores and 1.7GB of memory for up to 500 hours – for free.
The applications running on AppCloud are managed through a web interface, allowing to get started within minutes (or use ey-migrate to easily migrate an application from Heroku).
AppCloud runs Engine Yard's Technology Stack, which allows to choose between several Ruby implementations like JRuby, Ruby 1.8.X and 1.9.2 and now even Rubinius (note that the 500 hours trial account is restricted to a default application environment configuration only):
Engine Yard AppCloud provides you with a pre-integrated, pre-tested Ruby on Rails technology stack, including web, application and database servers, built-in monitoring and process management, a Rails- optimized linux distribution, in-memory caches and more. All components are monitored for security vulnerabilities and updated continuously as vulnerabilities are discovered and patched.
A full list of available software is online. After 500 hours of AppCloud time it's possible to upgrade, according to the FAQ:
Conversion into a full account is a simple process that requires the customer to input standard billing information and concludes with a single button click. Customers can then add additional capacity using existing AppCloud change procedures.
The FAQ also explains the motivation behind this offer:
Many Engine Yard customers use third-party development shops to create their applications. These third-parties have been asking for a means to create and deploy applications without directly signing up for paid accounts. The AppCloud trial is ideal for these scenarios because it allows the third- party to quickly get started without worrying about the downstream billing relationship.
EngineYard's AppCloud, Heroku and now VMWare's new Cloud Foundry, which offers Rails and Sinatra support, are just a few of the options for Ruby hosting today.
Where do you host your Ruby web applications?
