Looking for advice on deploying a small site

A friend has asked me if I could setup a very basic website with some
forums. It will only have about a dozen images or so and user base of
100 people or less. I plan on using RForum to create about a dozen
forums spread over 3 categories and have 1 main page for user login. I
am basically trying to keep it as simple and concise as possible,
nothing fancy. The development part I think I can handle okay, but I am
kind of lost when approaching the question of deployment. I want it to
be as easy as possible to get setup so I can focus on actually
developing. So my question is, for a site this small would just straight
Mongrel work okay? I have had limited experience setting up Mongrel with
Typo but that was just out of curiosity, and I did use the apache proxy
approach but was basically just following tutorials and hacking around
until it magically worked and would like to avoid that this time. My
second question is more of a request for hosting suggestions. Right now
I am looking at railsplayground.com. They have $5/mo service which allow
you to host rails apps using Mongrel (I am guessing they also use apache
in front of mongrel). I want to be able to develop/deploy this on a
linux virtual machine and then once its working just retrace my steps on
the actual host.

Thanks,
-AC

Alex,

For a small RForum site you should be fine using FastCGI or a small
mongrel cluster. As your site grows you may want to consider moving up
to a VPS. If you have any questions about what we offer at
RailsPlayground please feel free to contact us.


Joe C.

Sales Line: 1-800-603-4125
[email protected]