If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber (The Quick Start section gives a good feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other adapter if you were so inclined.