Often, developers know something in this area even if it's not their speciality. Until the site gets big that might be enough.

It really depends on the volume of traffic that you are getting on the site and also how you are currently deploying your Ruby on Rails website.

If you are deploying on Heroku or EngineYard - you would have a pretty well managed environment that could get you pretty far (up to top 10,000 sites?).

If you are hosted on Rackspace, Linode, Slicehost and/or dedicated hosting - then you'll probably need a system admin as you scale - since there are a lot more performance tweaks and security things to look into.

There are also services such as New Relic that allows you to keep track of your application's performance (if it is applicable to your site) - which would be able to pinpoint potential performance bottlenecks.

Bottomline, depends on the issues that you have during your launch out - generally, you'd want to look at how much revenue you're generating.

There is also a strong Ruby on Rails community over on IRC at freenode.net - whom you can tap to get some advice.

All the best!

Hi Jamie,

A sysadmin person is only required if you plan to host the website yourself. Many large websites (techcrunch to name an example) does not host internally, exactly because they want to avoid having to employ system administrators, buy and maintain hardware etc.

Ensuring good hosting will require a lot of money for good hardware and particular the systems administrator. Good system administrators does not come cheap, and you don't want a situation where your site is down for 14 days while your part-time sysadmin is on vacation, riding the waves on bahamas.

So: In your situation, I'm 90% sure that you should look into getting it professionally hosted. It will cost less, and you won't have to worry at all about hosting. Here's a link to a few Ruby on Rails hosts:

http://www.mybestratedwebhosting.com/best-web-hosting/top-5-ruby-on-rails-hosting.html

Good luck with the project!

If you're just launching the website, you probably don't need a full-time sysadmin. I have experience in starter and high-traffic Rails deployments on everything from Slicehost to Heroku, and I can help you get it all set up and do periodic/emergency maintenance for a good price. Shoot me an email at jarin@robotmode if you're interested.