The Rails Hosting Survey Results Are In!
Back in January, Planet Argon (a company with a very long history in developing and hosting Rails apps) launched a Rails Hosting Survey. They wanted to find out stuff about Rails developers, their deployment requirements, their experience, what tools they use, and so forth. And now the Rails Hosting Survey results are in! (in HTML, PDF, and CSV formats)
1251 people took the survey in the end and the results make for interesting browsing. There seems to be a bias towards experienced Rails developers overall, with the majority claiming to have been using the framework (as well as Ruby) for 2-3 years and with between 2 and 5 apps deployed in that time. Only 12% of respondents have never deployed a Web app using any other framework or language.
With that level of experience in mind, it's no surprise that source control is used by 96.9% of respondents and 63% of those are using Git (versus 36% for SVN and a mere 0.3% for CVS!). OS X takes 68% of market share for development platform with Linux/other UNIX variants coming in at 25% and Windows with just 6%.
Despite being just a year old, mod_rails / Phusion Passenger is also the most popular app server taking a 52% share.
Support from: 1st Easy offers UK Rails hosting (dedicated and shared) on a Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and LAMP stack. Want to evaluate performance or get to know us first? Let us set up a trial account for you - full technical support included!
March 11th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Passenger is definitely the way to go. I just converted another app over this from Mongrel this week... goodbye mongrel_cluster.yml, god.conf, etc.
March 12th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I think we'll see a lot more JRuby deployments next year. For example, we deploy all Intranet applications (which run on dedicated servers) using JRuby on Glassfish. Deploying all-inclusive .war files is really easy and it beats dealing with Apache and Passenger in my opinion (even though Passenger has been a great improvement for Rails hosting, don't get me wrong).
I'm also pleasantly surprised that Linux is so much more popular as a development platform than Windows. The OS X market share is of course not surprising at all :)