Back in the day I was impressed by EngineYard but couldn’t afford to use them. Now I can’t afford to not use them. I use them for several projects. We have the full 3 slice stack setup with one project – 2 production and 1 staging database. The service they provide is like going to a 4 star hotel. If you need something they do it. If you screw up your database they fix it. You don’t have to worry about backups. The crew at Engineyard takes care of that. You need a task to copy the production database to your local machine? It’s already done.
More recently I’ve started using Solo to host Genlighten (more to come on Genlighten soon). Solo sits on top of Amazon’s ec2 service. You might ask why you should pay more for EngineYard’s stack when you can just use Amazon’s services. That’s a good question. Although Solo doesn’t come with the same level of support as the main EngineYard product you will find Ezra (vice president) answering questions in the support form. You can get answers to your questions in just a few minutes in the IRC channel. Need to deploy a new Rails application? It takes just a few minutes to provision a new instance and have a full stack up and running.
As a side note they are a sponsor at the Mountain West Ruby Conference. They throw a big party where you can hang out and talk to the team. Several of the guys spent a couple of hours showing me Solo and outlining system architecture for some ideas I’ve had. Try to get that kind of support from anyone else.