[freelancr]

I am looking to learn Ruby on Rails and am looking for shared hosting, what web server software and/or control panel is best for RoR? Is RoR 2.0 backwards compatible with 1.x?

[proc355]

if your budget stretches to a vps (nothing fancy) then i would strongly suggest that route—shared isn't the best environment for rails.

control panel doesn't really come in to it, you'll have to get your hands dirty with the command line.

rails 2.0 is a whole new ball game compared to 1.x, quite a bit was deprecated.

bottom line is rails is pretty slow, even if it's daemonised; running it under fast-cgi (what you get with shared hosting) is even slower and the way shared hosts deal with the load is by killing off your processes—which means startup penalty/hangs/general malaise.

[cam]

I'd highly recommend using Litespeed, which makes RoR deployment a breeze. Very easy to install and administer (there's a GUI) and there's a free version too.

For VPS, I'm with slicehost, who've been excellent - been with them over a year with no issues.