Where Do Korean Rails Developers Deploy? Survey Results

I’m sharing the results of our first survey “Where do you deploy Rails in Korea?” conducted through the Ruby on Rails Newsletter #50.

Survey Overview

  • Respondents: 6 developers
  • Survey Type: Multiple choice allowed
  • Target Audience: Ruby on Rails newsletter subscribers (161 total subscribers)

Results Analysis

The deployment environment choices from our respondents were as follows:

1. DigitalOcean, GCP, Self-hosted servers (NAS, Raspberry Pi, etc.)
2. Self-hosted servers (NAS, Raspberry Pi, etc.)
3. AWS, Self-hosted servers (NAS, Raspberry Pi, etc.)
4. DigitalOcean
5. DigitalOcean
6. Self-hosted servers (NAS, Raspberry Pi, etc.)

Usage by Platform:

  • Self-hosted servers: 4 respondents (2 single-platform, 2 multi-platform)
  • DigitalOcean: 3 respondents (2 single-platform, 1 multi-platform)
  • AWS: 1 respondent (multi-platform)
  • GCP: 1 respondent (multi-platform)

Interestingly, 2 out of 6 respondents use multiple environments simultaneously, indicating they strategically choose different deployment environments based on their specific needs.

Why They Chose Each Platform

Here are the actual responses we collected from the survey:

Reasons for choosing self-hosted servers:

  • “Nothing beats self-hosting when starting small”
  • “For learning purposes and solo development, project size isn’t too big, so resource burden is minimal, and it’s surprisingly fast”
  • “No cost and great performance”

Reasons for choosing DigitalOcean:

  • “Familiar service, affordable and high degree of freedom”
  • “Convenient UX, documentation, pricing (though getting expensive lately, so reconsidering)”

Recently, Josh Pigford asked on Twitter: “What are the options for easily deploying Rails + Postgres apps?” The international community responded with:

  • Heroku: Still the go-to for simple deployment solutions
  • Render / Hatchbox / vibedeploy.dev: PaaS solutions gaining attention among Rails developers
  • DigitalOcean, Hetzner: VPS-based direct setup
  • Raspberry Pi self-hosted server cases were also mentioned

While both Korean and international communities have self-hosted server (including Raspberry Pi) use cases, the proportion of self-hosted servers appears relatively higher in Korea.

Characteristics of the Korean Rails Community

Although the sample size is small and difficult to generalize, we discovered several interesting patterns:

1. High Self-Hosted Server Usage Rate 67% of all respondents use self-hosted servers. This likely reflects a cost-sensitive approach, as many projects appear to be side projects or learning-oriented rather than business applications.

2. Multi-Platform Strategy One-third of respondents use multiple environments simultaneously, showing they employ optimized deployment strategies based on different use cases.

3. Practical Choices Keywords like “cost-effectiveness,” “learning purposes,” and “minimal resource burden” were frequently mentioned, indicating a tendency to prioritize practicality.

Conclusion

Although this was a small-scale survey, it was meaningful to hear real voices from Korean Rails developers about their deployment environment choices.

We’ll continue to share diverse voices from the Korean Rails community through our Ruby on Rails newsletter. Thank you to everyone who participated in our first survey!