Quite simple to add external services to a primary domain:
Currently hosting this site at heroku. Their sweet git integration rocks. Add config/heroku.yml to hide the toolbar
toolbar_public: false
toolbar_collaborators: false
Hosting images at smugmug. Definite flip between them and flickr.
Google apps for your domain for email has such good spam filtering.
My other sites live at Site5. New management will hopefully help them with their growing panes right now.
For shared hosting, ocs solutions, rails playground, and hosting rails look like good alternatives.
For vps, slicehost and linode look like good alternatives.
mod_rails at home allows me to quickly setup apps and forget them. Just run gem install passenger and passenger-install-apache2-module. I put the suggested configuration into /private/etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf.
On the mac, mod_rails preference pane manages vhosts and /etc/hosts entries.
Rspactor runs red-green just like autotest and autospec but uses disk events instead of scanning the hard drive.