Hey,<p>I have a new app that <i>hopefully</i> will have many users and is going to require more than the FREE Heroku plan (hosted on Heroku atm).<p>Does anyone have experience in scaling apps on Heroku? What's the price comparing with scaling on a VPS system?<p>I'm not sure if I should stay on Heroku or migrate to a VPS such as Linode.<p>Thanks.
Hosting costs will be much less with a VPS. For one CPU core with of processing and 20GB of storage it's $123 per month from Heroku and for $79.95 per month you can get a Linode 1440. However, if you need to scale easily Heroku can handle that for you and you'll have to do it yourself with a VPS.
A dyno or two should be able to handle a boatload of traffic for a well-designed "typical" web app. See <a href="http://docs.heroku.com/dynos#dyno-concurrency-and-scaling" rel="nofollow">http://docs.heroku.com/dynos#dyno-concurrency-and-scaling</a> for their performance claims (10-100 req per sec). Remember that with proper caching the number of reqs that actually hit a dyno may be a lot less than the number incoming (with Heroku you get a Varnish cache for free).<p>Unless your app gets truly impressively large traffic, or your app is so trivial that you have plenty of spare time for sysadmin tasks, Heroku is quite reasonably priced.