Wait, running the built-in server is one command (and no configuration), and it's quite reasonably claimed that Rails' equivalent built-in command is helping the adoption of Rails by people who are now in the position where you previously were.

It seems to me like it should be at least as easy to fire up the built-in web server as to learn FTP and sign up for some random shared hosting account, right? That is to say, isn't this even a lower barrier to entry than the FTP approach?