Ruby on Rails Web服务器

Question

I'm new to web development, and have a question about deploy ruby on rails application.

For what i'm understanding, there are two ways to deploy. One is using cloud server like Heroku (I'm currently using). You just need to upload your project to their cloud server and ready to go.

Another way is build your own server using, for example, apache+passenger. By doing this way, I need to have a physical computer with Ubuntu + Apache + Passenger running continually right?

So my question is which way is better, faster?

Answer 1

Heroku has a form of automated deployment built-in. There are other cloud-based providers which offer a similar sort of service.

The alternative is self-hosted. You don't need a "physical computer", you can use a virtualized server in the cloud just the same. Popular choices are Linode , Digital Ocean and Amazon EC2 which is what Heroku is based on.

"Better" is highly subjective. Do you know how to maintain a server? If the answer to this question is "No", then Heroku is probably the best bet.

If you do know how to maintain a server, you can usually get better performance from your own rig since you have full control over how your application is launched, how long it stays running, and can increase resources at marginal additional cost. The downside is you're responsible for everything should it malfunction.