Droplets on digital ocean running docker containers. That’s as portable as it gets, but it’s also very DIY. A lot of the reasons you might use a cloud provider is the wide host of services that are meant to make your life easier.
Honestly it’s been my experience with Ruby that it’s Rails that can potentially be slow. Ruby is quite fast and even has a JIT option. Rails is by design opinionated, and for some cases I’ve found that I’ve had to work extra hard to ensure performance. That means refactoring code in slightly non traditional ways and having a deeper understanding of how Rails works under the hood (esp in the ORM). So if you think you can just use Ruby+Rails out of the box in its simplest form without experience and depth of understanding: yes it might be slow. But like with all things, you can go quite far with care and experience.
The best advice I been given: “when your problems seem overwhelming, get busy solving other people’s problems. Not only will you feel good about helping others and get that feeling of productivity, seeing what others are dealing with will also give you perspective on your own problems and a renewed sense of hope and energy”. Volunteer somewhere. Help a friend out. But try to do it in person where you can get more of that human connection.
That’s very much a talk to your CPA question - because it speaks to audit risk. The IRS wants to see you pay yourself a fair salary so you are paying the appropriate payroll taxes, social security, medicare, etc. The problem is “fair” is somewhat subjective and depends on the profitability of the business as well. I’m sorry this isn’t a clear answer, but it’s just not a clear matter. Seek advice and ask “how would you defend this stance in an audit”.