It might be exaggerated a bit but the point is valid. You've got enough things to worry about. Do you really want to be sysadmin too?

Of course Heroku and similar services get you most of the way there, but there are plenty of client-side devs who would rather not deal with backend code at all.

I see Heroku, Beanstalk, et al as the future here. This code-less approach will hit a brick wall very quickly, at which point they'll be writing something not unlike Google AppEngine, which itself suffers from being proprietary.

Yes, this may have been true 10 years ago when installing everything meant getting the source , setting compile flags for everything to work together and updates were applied manually.

These days I can have Ubuntu , Apache , PHP5 , Mysql and Wordpress all working happily on a VPS in under an hour.

On the other hand there are other considerations like maintenance , security and scaling that it might be nice not to have to worry about.

Well, sure, LAMP is easy to set up if you're working in PHP; that's one of the huge advantages PHP has over most other options. You want to set up and deploy to a Rails server, though, that's going to be a bit more effort.

>You want to set up and deploy to a Rails server, though, that's going to be a bit more effort.

I do that regularly enough. For single server setups, I've got it down to about 60-90 minutes - and that's because I've been too lazy to automate it.

I've actually had an easier time setting up Phusion Passenger with Apache than I've had setting up PHP. Ease of deployment isn't necessarily a major advantage in PHP's corner anymore.

Like Phil said, it doesn't take more than an hour if you're feeling lazy about it. I've automated it with Chef, but I haven't timed it or anything. Less than 10 minutes for sure.

Rails is not the difficult after you have done it a few times, just line up your console commands and get to work most of the time is waiting for stuff to download/compile.

It's pretty cheap to host your rails app on a server such as Heroku and that takes minutes to deploy.

Heroku is Free for most small things and reasonable if you only need one instance. Not as easy as Parse but far from rocket science.

git push heroku master - FTW.

Not too much more difficult , reverse proxying with apache is only a few lines in the conf file.

Days/Months of effort?

Thank you! I read the first sentence: There was a time when building a cutting edge web app meant wasting hours setting up a Linux server, days installing MySQL and Ruby or PHP, and months slaving away writing backend server code.. Huh? I little over the top wouldn't you say!