Graphics World 6 - Release Candidate 1

*Drum roll* It's here! I froze my development tree and henceforth this day shall be known as the day of  first production version of Graphics World v6. Ok, on a more serious note, of course nobody with the exception of myself cares about this, but in my book it is nonetheless a monumental event.

Of course, the concept of a 'candiate release' is somewhat of a misnomer for an agile development framework such as Rails - it's more of a mental hurdle to force myself to stop adding new features. Case in point, after my first 'freeze' about mid-day yesterday I realized that I forgot to implement the Google Sitemap code, so, about 40 minutes later I had RC 1.0.1 with Sitemap support! And on top of all this, I also have a wishlist on the wall with a number of features I would like to see implemented in my future releases. (six of them at the moment)

The development work can continue forever in a perpetual cycle of iterative design and additional features - at some point you've got to stop, and just ship it. And I think I've reached that point; I've implemented all of the core features I wanted to see from the beginning and even added a few extras from my wishlist - it is ready to see the light of day.

So, checkpoint in SVN and now the question is: How and where do I deploy it? I need a new server for this app to allow for scalability and to avoid the complexity of running different web-servers for different sites. My original idea was to use EC2 (Elastic Cloud by Amazon), I have an invite sitting in my mailbox but the more I read about it the more skeptical I become. It's a beta in the full sense of that word: no persistence (need to build a custom MySQL replication solution) and DNS (or lack of thereof - each new machine gets its address from the DHCP) are the main hurdles. Now, I know I can work around these issues but I'm hesitant - it's not a production platform. In the long run it will be a headache for both myself and the visitors and that is something I would like to avoid.

Hence, I'm leaning towards a VPS (Virtual Private Server) solution at the moment. It's not as exciting, but it will get the task done and free up my time to focus on school and other important things I should be worrying about. (Grad. school applications?)

Anyone has recommendations for VPS's, Rails hosting providers? I do need to have root access to the environment, anything less just won't work.