It's ridiculously easy.

Even 6 years ago when I started, you could just run it in production with `mix phx.server`, much like running `rails server` and use the exact same deployment patterns. Or you could build a release and copy it up to the server however you saw fit. At that time it was painful for some coming from different habits that involved pulling in config at run-time rather than compile time, but those patterns have also been supported since at least 2019.

Since then, the team has been continually making it easier.

Now there's a single command line to do a deploy to Fly and also one to build a docker container for you if that's what you want: https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1468998944009166849

I've just tried heroku so far and took me about 30 min to deploy my prototype, but I read there are limitations. Go take a look at fly.io and I think there's also another one that specialize in elixir hosting. Once I understand elixir/erlang better, I will probably want to host there.

I've deployed Rails at a few different companies. I wouldn't quantify it has hard by any means, there's just a lot of configurations to read through and verify every time. Realistically, the defaults are complete sane and could be deployed as is without much change.

at a base, you can use heroku. That said, you won't be able to have your nodes communicate with each other. This restricts you from some of the more advanced featues. For Example, at my startup, we use horde to dynamically spin up individual websocket connections per customer for a integration partner. This was easy to do using horde and simply connecting the nodes together. Additionally, we can use the built in key store which is global to the cluster.

I would take a look at render.com. they support connected nodes and autodiscovery

I hear fly.io is good.

Agreed. Immutable functional Elixir is the very opposite programming model of mutable state Ruby OOP.