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Performance matters in web applications, but that is almost never determined by the speed of execution of the web framework programming language. The performance bottlenecks are almost always in the database and/or the architecture.

It's also very easy to scale horizontally the execution of the web code. That's why, for most web software, programmer productivity is more important than raw language performance

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Horizontal scalability is not always easy, but it is always expensive. Startups especially tend to discover the latter the hard way when they receive surprise bills from AWS.

Scaling horizontally a Rails application where the bottleneck is the Ruby code is always very easy - just add more instances working on the same DB. It is usually more difficult because the bottleneck is in the DB, not the Ruby code.

You're right about price though; if the cost of compute is relevant in your business model - which, again, usually isn't the case - then doing that computation with Ruby on AWS isn't the best choice.

> surprise bills from AWS

Surprise bills from AWS means it is time for refactoring ( and thus optimization time ;)

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