Ask HN: Am I crazy to port my Rails app to PHP?

I've recently been working on a small, "hobby" web app - http://yoyocase.net. It's been a chance for me to scratch an itch (I want to show off my collection) as well as to learn Rails.

Finding hosting for my app has been challenging, though. I don't plan on monetizing this, so I really can't justify "expensive" web hosting. Nor do I want to go with a VPS - I don't want to play sysadmin in my spare time.

So, I've also been porting my code to PHP (not raw; CodeIgniter!), and plan to put it on my shared hosting account. Am I shooting myself in the foot?

Alternatively, do any of you know where I could find relatively cheap "shared" Rails hosting - a place where I wouldn't have to setup my own virtual server(s), keep all the software/packages up to date, etc.?

I jumped on the Rails band wagon early and loved all the syntatic sugar that comes from Ruby, and I'd never really developed with an MVC pattern.

Like you, I gradually realized I was spending more time as a sysadmin or bashing my clients' commodity hosting into submission than actually building sites. I felt like I was cheating when I finally went back to PHP (CodeIgniter, also).

It wasn't til I rsync'd the PHP site I was working on to the prod server and saw it just work that I started feeling a bit better. Since then, I've been totally happy using simple but solid PHP frameworks.

So, I think you're on the right track. Admittedly, I'm a little out of date on the state of Rails deployment. But if you're productive in PHP, go for it.

But honestly, it's whatever language works best for you. If you've got a good framework in front of it that's helping to keep you from making dumb mistakes, then that's all that really matters.

Second, there is surely alot of rails-hosters out there, keep looking if you want to build your app with pure ror.But the beatuy of php is what you already have seen; it just works!