Ninefold rocks. Just today, I used the Ninefold chat to ask a question about my account, and the chat rep got my main rep within a minute, then he solved the question within a few more minutes. Superior service-- thanks Ryan!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they have no free tier. This is a big mistake, and it's one reason they probably can't catch Heroku.

I generally start out my Rails apps on Heroku free, because why not? It's dead simple to deploy and it lets me test how my app will perform in the "real world". Until I get any real traffic, I just point my domain at herokuapp.com and let them deal with the bill. Heroku knows this, and encourages it.

Here's how they get you though: what do you do when HN picks up your side project? All of a sudden your request load goes up by 10x, 100x, or even 1000x. Do you take the time to move it to AWS to save the money, or do you just say "oh fuck need moar server!" and turn up the Heroku web servers dial to 5. Suddenly you're a Heroku customer, all because they had the easiest place to host your MVP.

I've met a lot of the Ninefold crew through the Sydney rails community. Great group who contribute a lot to the local ruby scene, glad to see them doing well.

I met some of their folks at RailsConf a couple weeks ago. Ninefold is from Australia and the company is new to America, as they put it. As much as I like Heroku, I'm pretty excited by the potential of Ninefold and am planning on playing with it some because I'm hopeful that it'll become my go-to platform for Rails apps.

It's one of the companies I was investigating for hosting. Them, EngineYard and DotCloud/Docker. Probably gonna go with EngineYard since it's older and more established but it's nice to see good products emerging and creating disruption and competition. Best of luck to them.

Sounds cool. I'm interested to try it out for a personal project.