My first reaction was also that the $129 price tag seems steep, but then I started doing the math: My guess is that if you want to go with EC2 on your own that it's approximately $50 per month cheaper than Solo (see <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3t" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3t</a> for the AWS EC2 cost calculator).<p>However, my guess is that there is a significant number of of Rails hackers who would be better off spending those extra $50 to get going right away instead of messing around themselves trying to configure their EC2 instance.<p>Ezra mentions a lot of details in his introduction video on the EY site, such as a hardened and and pre-compiled <i>nix packages (</i>cough* rmagick), optimizing MySQL memory usage etc, knowledge they have built-up over the years within EY. Their knowledge is worth money.<p>The only problem I foresee for EY's Solo is that the 'end result' of an EC instance deployed by Solo is easily copied. All the knowledge poured into the configs are accessible by anyone with root access to the instance, and nothing prevents you from deploying the next instance completely yourself. But if the configuration management tools of Solo (and upcoming Flex) seriously rock than I doubt that this will be an attractive option.
Heroku is free. It's also easier and available right now. I uploaded the code for <a href="http://fuel.dustincurtis.com" rel="nofollow">http://fuel.dustincurtis.com</a> and it was working within 10 minutes.<p>For most of my little fun projects, I don't need an entire instance, and Solo is extremely expensive for that.<p>Also, I have a question for Engine Yard: why did you make the EC2 stuff transparent? One of the downsides of EC2 is that it has a very complicated pricing structure. The people Solo is targeting probably don't want to deal with a 20 row table of different prices.
Who else is saying, "YES YES YES YES YES YES YES"? haha<p>I am.<p>I think the beauty of Engine Yard and Heroku is that at some point in time, one of these two companies (or perhaps Google), will figure out a way to "just scale." At that point, web developers will just simply follow some basic guidelines and never worry about system administration again. I think that will be an extremely happy day for me.
As a long time Engine Yard customer I can say $129 is a very good deal considering the level of support that brings you. We've run PMOG (<a href="http://pmog.com" rel="nofollow">http://pmog.com</a>) on EngineYard from a small starting slice right up to a real application and I've found them to consistently be responsive, knowledgable and scale-able, if you see what I mean :)<p>I'd strongly recommend anyone checkout EY solo. Hearing about their plans flex, the ability to run with passenger and soon rack, should make you realise that they know how to handle Ruby.
I can't believe so many folks are talking about how expensive it is. It's $129 per month people!!<p>If you're gonna launch anything that people will use you ought to be able to monetize. If you can't, what the hell are you doing in the first place?!