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

About 18 months ago I came to the realization that Rails just wasn't required for the projects I was using.

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 Admittedly, I'm a little out of date on the state of Rails deployment.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.

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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.

This doesn't address your original question, but when I visited your site, I immediately thought of my college years (early '90s) when my dormmates and I took up yo-yo-ing (sp?). We had a blast showing off our newly learned tricks. In fact, I hadn't thought much about that time until I saw your site.

Now that I have small children (3 and 2 yr/olds) it makes me want to take up the hobby again to show them the fun in it. So, think about ways that your site could grow into something that you hadn't originally thought of. Example: if you had instructions/videos demonstrating yo-yo tricks. A searchable, fun way for people to show off their hobby.

So, if you had the desire to monetize this one day, you may actually have some interest from people. This is just to say that maybe you shouldn't keep a tight lid on your ideas.

Good luck!

As some commentars said, choose the language/framework that suits the problem.

That said, I have experienced and heard that the time made up by using Rails/Ruby, is much less than the time it takes to customize a Rails app to get it to do what you want. Especially when there's a lot of customization. What I like about PHP and frameworks like CodeIgnitor, is that customization is dead easy. You only write code for what you want to achieve, you don't need to work around the framework's preset functionality.

Short answer, it depends. A lot of customization, use PHP, something that fits with Ruby/Rails, use that.

You could try out webfaction.com; It offers a control panel where you can add as much apps as you want (including Django, RoR, static PHP, Worpress, etc.). The only 'real' limitation you have is memory usage. I have about 15 different apps running on the smallest webfaction acocunt and it works great; comes cheap too and you don't have to update it because it's a virtual server but it is maintained by webfaction (not your version of RoR, but the system itself). If you take the cheapest package the price is between $5.50 and $9.50 a month depending on how long you want to use it.

Definately try http://heroku.com. They have an excellent free plan that is perfect for smaller projects and development.

Also, if you use git, it's really easy to deploy an app by just pushing up to Heroku.

I have a shared plan on mediatemple. I am not a ruby man yet am 100% you can run rails. Then you can demonstrate both your ruby skills and your new found php skills.

More a note to myself than anything: check out http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112543

First off, smart change! (see: http://www.canrailsscale.com).

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!

If it's a hobby app, no, you're not crazy, you're fine :)

> I don't want to play sysadmin in my spare time collaborate with someone who does.

check out hostingrails.com