I guess it goes both ways. I have to mentally translate all those boilerplate curly mess when reading JavaScript and find CoffeeScript much easier to understand. CoffeeScript is much closer to Ruby syntactically, not to mention a Rails default.

Yes, a great interview question. And it's quite surprising how many devs do not know those things and still manage to build successful web applications, if not necessarily the most performant/secure/maintainable.

Yes a bunch of morons. I would even ask them to write everything in 1's and 0's to see what they really know.

Frankly I'm surprised by the popularity of this post. :)

It seems there is a big demand for knowledge about how the web actually works under the hood. I will make some time to describe the other HTTP verbs, and not necessarily in the context of Shelly Cloud. It will probably be a longer blog post anyway, with diagrams to describe the concepts. Hmm, a good topic for a presentation perhaps?

The one hosting I'd recommend is of course Shelly Cloud: https://shellycloud.com/ I'm a co-founder and I can tell you we have everything you asked for:

- Super easy deployment. Just as in Heroku you just do a git push and we take care of the rest. We also offer integrated setup for databases and file storage, so deployment of Ruby applications is even more streamlined than on Heroku.

- Super easy maintenance. We take care of monitoring, and broken processes and machines are replaced automatically. You also get logs and backups for free.

- Great support. We're Ruby programmers ourselves and we're easily approachable. Even if you're not our client feel free to visit our Campfire room at http://support.shellycloud.com/ . We help with deployment to our platform and day to day usage problems for free.

- Highly reliable architecture. We offer components (like mongo replica sets) that allow you to create applications with very high uptime.

- Great performance. In our model you get something comparable to an EC2 instance, so even our "small" server gets you much more power (and RAM space) than a Heroku dyno.

I hope that this at least piqued your interest. Feel free to ask questions, I'd be glad to answer them.

+1 for that, I've been using Shellycloud for almost a year now and the support has been great