Dallas at Dreamhost:
The feeling I get from the Rails community is that Rails is being pushed as some sort of high-end application system and that makes it OK to ignore the vast majority of user web environments. You simply cannot ignore the shared hosting users. In my opinion, the one thing the PHP people did that got them to where they are today is to embrace shared hosting and work hard to make their software work well within it.
It’s certainly the case that Ruby and Rails simply is not suited for use in a shared hosting environment. The basic gist of Rails is that it’s easy and convenient from a programming perspective, but very difficult from a hosting perspective. It’s easy to say “The Rails team should make it easier to host”, but it’s sort of the nature of the beast, and I’ve never seen a good recommendation for specifically how they could do so.