I\'ll be trying to sell my Ruby on Rails development skills to small local busin

Question

I'll be trying to sell my Ruby on Rails development skills to small local businesses.

It seems I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I couldn't manage to put their apps into production, in fact catering for this would be a selling point.

However, I do not want to bill every client monthly for the cost of their hosting, they would have to be the contract holders with the hosting service, and I'd only consult if they needed technical help when scaling.

I've looked on one hand at cloud platforms, like engine yard, which seem like they would be too costly for the smaller clients, and on the other hand at vps providers which seem they would not be client friendly enough.

Has anyone faced the same issue and come up with a decent solution ?

Explanation / Answer

It seems that you are missing out on some potential revenue by making that restriction--worse, you may lose business because of it. Here's the deal with local small businesses (a good friend of mine runs an IT support business that caters to this market): they don't want to deal with the headaches of hosting companies. If something went wrong, the hosting company most likely isn't going to know anything about the app you deployed. They won't be able to diagnose the problems and bring the system back to functioning perfectly.

Your best bet is to find someone who caters to the IT support (such as my friend) while you sell application development skills. The IT support company takes care of the monthly billing, and first line support role. This takes the monthly responsibilities off your shoulders (what you want) without leaving the small business with a "dump and run" application.

The fewer moving parts you have in your application the easier it is to troubleshoot and support the application. When you throw cloud computing in the mix, it's just going to make things more complicated. And what if the cloud isn't accessible for some reason? Systems fail. Will the application also die?

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