this post may already be two months old, but this could still be interesting: In addition to your list of Rails hosting alternatives, Google’s AppEngine is also capable of running Rails and should be ready for prime time by now.
AppEngine is a platform as a service and Rails can be deployed as a Java application based on JRuby. I think Heroku is the most comparable approach and AppEngine shares the disadvantage of the need to learn the platform restrictions. This mainly involves the data base, which is a No-SQL data store. Scalable, but complete different approach to what most Rails developers are used to.

Best thing: AppEngines is free to get started. Rails introduces a large overhead for spawning serving instances (Google swaps out applications without traffic to conserve resources), but this can be overcome by paid reserved instances, which are always running.
Deployment of Rails apps works like a breeze.

The main resource to get started is here: http://code.google.com/p/appengine-jruby/

Best wishes for AR in 2011!
Regards

Stefan

This is fantastic! I’ve been lurking for a while, but the time has come to get involved. I think I’d even like to get delve into your white label program when it becomes available..more on that later.

I’m going to search out your methods for scalable organic seo via BCC, but am curious to know how you intend to do this for AR. In many ways, we have many over lapping customers.

Thanks again and keep up the good work!

Aaron

Spiffy: I haven’t spoken to my users clients. Whether their users appreciate being reminded of their appointments is their lookabout, not mine. (I can, of course, block someone from being reminded again if they complain.)

1) I rank well for things like “appointment reminder”, “text message appointment reminder”, etc. People give me their email addresses after using the demo and sometimes call or email me with questions. I listen very attentively.

2) I have some old friends who work in e.g. massage therapy practices, and asked their thoughts and then for referrals to other people to talk to.

3) People in the service industry are in the business of trading time for money, with anyone who walks in their door. I walk in during dead hours (e.g. 2 PM on a Tuesday) and offer to pay to chat.

I would like to hear how did you shortlist and initiate the process of talking to the “Martha”s and “Earnest”s. How did you get them to talk to you? Did you offer any incentives? How did you establish your credibility to them?

Thanks again,

I would very much like to hear how you have set up your project management, bug tracking, subcontractor management, and programming environments. I do not recall reading about those in your blog (or, perhaps you wrote about them so long ago that the details are no longer relevant).

Thank you

Scott