This hit a nerve for me. I keep going back and looking at Engine Yard Hoping there will be something there for me but I just can't justify moving from Heroku for the ruby stuff. They have so many knobs to turn and a nice low entry point for very small apps that can be cranked up easily. It's this low barrier to entry that Engine Yard is missing and free for three weeks is not a substitute for this.<p>AppCloud seems to be (and I hate to use this word) "just" a thin wrapper around EC2. At least I get that impression looking at the price points - the smallest 32bit instance is just shy of 1k/year. Am I going to get more performance out of three Dynos at Heroku for about the same cost? Maybe maybe not. But where am I going to put my staging test/servers? On a 20/month VPS? On an instance @AppCloud that I spin up and down? No, I'll tell you where, I'm going to stick it on a Dyno or two at Heroku and not worry about it. And then when I need to scale or the product is ready for production where is it going to be hosted. That's right - the same place it's been validated and tested on.<p>By the way, Engine Yard is not the only place that has this barrier to entry problem. Most of the cloud providers do. Joyent.com, Media Temple, Rackspace cloud all have Barriers whether it's poor documentation, higher than normal base costs and bandwidth fees or just inconvenience like having to wait on a call from someone in Texas in order to be allowed to create instances.<p>If the other players want to compete with Heroku on the service and ease of use side or Amazon on flexibility and scale then they are going to have to do much, much, much better.