Engine Yard uses Amazon EC2 to power their Ruby platform.

They spent thousands of man-hours optimizing the stack, fine-tuned with a lot of automation built into the product.

Engine Yard is $18 a month more expensive than the basic small instance on Amazon EC2.

See

Storage and bandwidth fees are a pass-thru cost from Amazon (no markup).

Billing is per hour with no contracts, just like Amazon.

Appcloud docs

See

Engine Yard uses git.

To port from Subversion to git, see

Load balancing is done in Engine Yard's Ruby stack and you don't need a load balancing server (but you do need multiple instances to load balance with).

Engine Yard will not support Amazon's new micro-instances.

They also do not offer some Amazon EC2 features, like auto-scaling and RDS, Amazon's database, because they use MySQL.

Engine Yard chose only features that have value for Ruby apps.

Quick questions can be answered in IRC where the Engine Yard engineers hang out, but they also offer paid priority support.

Engine Yard does not offer a free service, like some competitors.

To sign up, visit

For $18 a month, you get a fully-automated Ruby deployment system so you can focus on writing great code.

If Engine Yard saves you a couple hours a month, it pays for itself.