The Board is hosted by
Virtual Impressions. They can certainly handle your needs for Ruby on Rails experimentation. I can't speak to pricing - that's Chad's area. But I can tell you that when we've had a problem that was host related (running out of disk space, server or clock resets, etc.), they have been VERY responsive.
I ran a Board for the Boston band for quite a few years, and used
Hosts of America. Very reasonable prices, good support, wide range of services. I haven't used them in the last 5 years or so - the board I was running ended for a number of reasons - none related to the hosting company. A lot can change in that period of time, so I can't really say whether they are still as good as they were.
Unfortunately, it seems that shared hosting is a hit-or-miss proposition. Take GoDaddy as an example - some folks use it and rave about it, some b!^@h about it constantly. I can never see a patern, except that the more server or database intensive the site, the more problems they have, which makes sense. But for more basic needs, I think it's probably not bad.
Sorry I can't offer more - I host my own web and FTP from my server at home, and really haven't tried many hosts.
