I'll be trying to sell my Ruby on Rails development skills to small local businesses.

It seems I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I couldn't manage to put their apps into production, in fact catering for this would be a selling point.

However, I do not want to bill every client monthly for the cost of their hosting, they would have to be the contract holders with the hosting service, and I'd only consult if they needed technical help when scaling.

I've looked on one hand at cloud platforms, like engine yard, which seem like they would be too costly for the smaller clients, and on the other hand at vps providers which seem they would not be client friendly enough.

Has anyone faced the same issue and come up with a decent solution ?