What do you think about Amazon EC2 for your service? I think it's great idea. As you may know, standard template “Amazon EC2 Rails-All-in-one-trial” by Amazon AWS is not good… yeap, it is. Let me show you how fix it by your hads :)

Let’s start. We have a useful EC2 based on CentOS 5.2. Great enterprise linux for the Rails application. But Ruby 1.8.5 on aboard, it’s deeply out-of-date…

http://rubyonrails.org/download We recommend Ruby 1.8.7 for use with Rails. Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.5, 1.8.4 and 1.8.2 are still usable too, but version 1.8.3 is not.

Well, do you want to run Rails with old Ruby? If, you have 2 ways to get newer Ruby version:

* Ruby Enterprise edition as additional package, who need to install from sources (http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/download.html). Telling the truth, feel free to install it, very easy.
* Use extra repo to the CentOS who include good version of Ruby 1.8.6 (patch 111) and other dependent libraries http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=1182 or followed bash scrip

see more deatails at my "blog":http://www.railsgeek.com/2009/1/29/amazon-aws-ec2-rails-all-in-one