How on earth do you get from "Rails 2.x will be deprecated sometime in the future, they say" to "your server is down 6 hours"? Do you think anyone reading this is coding (and updating libraries) live on the server? This is Rails, not PHP we're talking about.
If you don't have a system / recipe in place for rolling out new servers, having the newest framework is really not going to help you all that much.
That said, we run our current Rails 2.x products on shared servers (Rackspace). Their default set up works just fine.
You built up a horror scenario to prove your point, unfortunately it doesn't reflect reality / relies on a lot of assumptions about dev/ops incompetence that you didn't make clear.
Actually I've seen very similar things happen in practise. "Horror scenarios" happen all the time.
Look, you can sing the "works for me!" song all you like. The fact is, you are years out of date and this is very bad practise.
You will:
- have trouble even installing a compatible environment from scratch
- have trouble searching for information on issues you encounter
- have trouble hiring anyone good to work with your decidedly legacy code
With a fast moving platform like rails, you allow yourself to fall years behind the mainstream to your sorrow. It's like keeping backups. Yeah, you're fine without them, until the "horror scenario".
