NEW Try our hosting solution: host.rupy.se!

NEW Rupy works great on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) micro instance.

There are 2 things your hosting has to provide and that you need to know how to use for you to be able to take advantage of sprout:

1. Java (1.5 or later)
2. MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle (any versions)

The easiest way to get this cheaply is to buy a Virtual Private Server (VPS) solution:

It's recommended that you use linux and front the sprout/rupy server with an Apache, so then it makes sense if you know:

1. SSH
2. Apache (with mod_proxy)
3. HAProxy, to loadbalance or proxy your site.

Observe that OpenVZ does have it's fair share of issues with virtual memory and therefore you will not be able to compile on the host machine; so it's great that rupy can hot deploy directly to the host from the development machine remotely via HTTP.

If you want to host multiple sites on one machine or host one site on multiple machines, you have to VirtualHostProxy or loadbalance your domain with Apache or HAProxy.

Dependencies: Sprout uses rupy, a "tiny footprint" embedded HTTP server that uses below 1 MB in heap, it's not a problem to run one rupy instance per 32 MB of RAM, which means that on any VPS account you will be able to run at least 4 instances, since the smallest amount of guaranteed RAM is 128 MB in the solutions above.