Dear full stack ruby developers. What gadgets can you not live without?

I'm surprised other people are giving you concrete answers as it is impossible to say. How much have you invested in building the current ROR based system? Are the developers happy to code with both or are they simply steering you towards the technology they know? Magento is a great platform. Extensions are a double edged sword, they can be very good and save a lot of effort. Likewise there are some terrible extensions out there. The cumulative effect of adding lots of extensions can be really bad as well. Ultimately, you are likely to get what you pay for, no matter which platform you go with.

Rails is a full-stack framework that emphasizes the use of well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), the active record pattern, and model–view–controller (MVC)

Depending on how many simultaneous users you want the application to be able to serve at any given time (peak), and how much processing your application does when uploading and downloading files (as well as other typically used operations), your hosting specification requirements may vary. But, to offer some basic guidance, you could probably get started with about 3 Virtual Machines (2 for load balancing serving the web application itself, and one running the database). I'd get them with around 4GB ram and 2 CPU cores each. These run at around $40/month each on Digital Ocean. You could also use AWS, SoftLayer, Heroku, and others, each with their own pros and cons. For example, if you use AWS you could (depending on which database you're using) leverage RDS for your database which could simplify your scaling and operations. I'd suggest you store the uploaded files on S3, Object Storage, or similar service (as opposite to serving it from the file system which makes it harder to scale). Hope this helps as a quick guidance. As you can see there's lots of options and details to consider. If you'd like to setup a call, I can certainly help you dig deeper into the different options and which ones would work best for your specific needs.

If you're looking for Ruby folks, go where they go - local meetups. Second would be online but you will need to mine Stackoverflow, Github and similar sites and realize that they get approached regularly so start engaging early (at least 3 months before projected start date.)

Hosting: Heroku: Great for small applications and getting off the ground as fast as possible. It's easy to manage and your team can focus on features instead of worrying about maintaining operations. Cloud (AWS, Rackspace, Azure): Great if you're expecting growth. You can start up instances easily and shut others down if you don't need them anymore. You still need to manage your servers, but as you grow to several servers, it'll be worth it. Inhouse: If you don't expect growth, or you have enough money to hire a few people to take care of the equipment, this is the cheapest option for computing power. I wouldn't recommend it for a new company since it takes so much maintenance. Deployment: This depends on which environment you work on. Ruby has Capistrano, Python has fabric, etc. Heroku also has their own deployment method and some other cloud providers also do. A quick google search will most likely lead you to the most popular method for your technology. Chat: My favourite is Hipchat (http://hipchat.com/). There's also Campfire (https://campfirenow.com/) and several other providers. Hipchat has a native client for each platform (even mobile) that gets really handy. Error monitoring: This is also a field with many competitors. My favourite by far would be Sentry (http://getsentry.com). There's also Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) and HoneyBadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/). System Monitoring: This depends on what you want to monitor. The most popular in the ruby world is NewRelic (http://newrelic.com/). It monitors application and database performance. If you just want to monitor your server (cpu, memory, uptime), you can try out Server Density (http://www.serverdensity.com/).