title: Recommendations (and Differences) between different Ruby on Rails Production Web Servers
body: <p>Very soon I plan on deploying my first Ruby on Rails application to a production environment and I've even picked a webhost with all the managed server and Capistrano goodness you'd expect from a RoR provider.</p>
  
  <p>The provider allows for Mongrel, Thin, Passenger &amp; FastCGI web servers, which seems very flexible, but I honestly don't know the differences between them.  I have looked into them some, but it all gets a bit much when they start talking about features and maximum simultaneous requests - and that this data seems to vary depending on who's publishing it.</p>
  
  <p>I have looked at Passenger (on the surface) - which does seem very appealing to me - but I was under the impression that Passenger wasn't the actual webserver, and instead was more like a layer on top of Apache or nginx and managed spawned instances of the application (like a Mongrel cluster).</p>
  
  <p>Can anyone please set me straight with the differences in layman's terms so as I can choose wisely (because anyone who's seen <em>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</em> knows what happens if you choose poorly). </p>