Have you instead considered selling them on one of the growing number of Rails specific hosting companies, many of which offer far more than basic hosting?
What is the big push to only use windows servers? Are then scared of having to call in support later?
I’ve found that when offering services like this you need to establish the requirements up front and in the case of rails Linux or some Unix would be your best bet for continued stability and performance.
I think that explaining the platform decision should come down to features and expandability of the platform not if the windows “admins” can support it. I feel that the benefit of using a well supported Linux Distro with apache/mongrel far out weigh the costs of trying to implement the rails solution on a windows machine and trying to match the performance.
my .02
-mark
I imagine that if I’d have said 'yeah it’s fine to run on windows but we’ve found performance
to be far better on *nix based systems’, it wouldn’t have been as much of a problem.
True, True. Kinda dug your self into a hole in that aspect 
I for one have absolutely 0 experience using a windows box as a production server so I cant attest to its performance and what not but I am sure there are people on the list that have deployed apps on windows machines.
Good luck friend. This might end up being a good experience that you could share with the rest of us.
-mark
