I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff.<p>Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message.<p>I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error rate since every minute is costing us money.
It just occurred to me that you know you've made some pretty serious traction as a startup when HN posts about your company no longer have something like "(YC W08)" appended to the end.
It all depends on what the SLA says, but hypothetically, if they are down for 24 hours a year, that's 99.7% uptime, which isn't terrible.<p>Heroku had a 1-2 hour outage the week after we switched an app there last year. My boss was freaking out, cursing about how they were unreliable, etc, neglecting the following:<p>1. The timing was unfortunate, but that was the first outage in months.<p>2. We had had multiple outages on our Rackspace box that were our own fault, due to bad server management.<p>In the long term you're likely better on Heroku, for small companies at least.
I have an app running on Heroku. Interestingly, it caches itself using HTML 5 application cache, so most people won't even notice the site is down. Need to make sure the background network ops are fault tolerant though.
You have to give Heroku credit for selling major quantities of Kool Aid. They've been pretty flakey for the past couple of months, and people are here claiming that this is the first outage. Someone's even claiming that 99.7% is a good record.
"Applications are fully restored." via <a href="http://status.heroku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://status.heroku.com/</a><p>Downtime always sucks, but gotta give them credit the way they keep everyone in the loop and provided status along the way.
It's worth noting that this was not universal as far as I can tell.<p>I have 5 minute watchdogs on all of my 3 sites in production with Heroku, and none of them pinged me. Given that I know the watchdogs work (regular testing and previous incidents) I would have to conclude that not everyone was affected.
We've been monitoring a heroku instance for the past 8 months. Our current instance uptime is 99.953% (about 200 minutes of downtime). Of the 76 services we monitor, Heroku is #64.<p><a href="http://cloudharmony.com/status" rel="nofollow">http://cloudharmony.com/status</a>
The magic of cloud computing: As someone running an app on Heroku, I had no idea. Luckily, I simply don't care.<p>Our app has a cyclic usage pattern and all is quiet right now. So rather than freaking out about it, I'll just let someone at Heroku figure it all out.<p>It would suck if it happened during our busy period, but then again I could say "We're working on it." and just assume the Heroku team will fix things faster than I ever could have with my limited *nix admin skills.
It's sooner or later for most people to realize that, it is not that safe to rely on a specific deployment system that is not directly controllable. It could be dangerous to use a full stack that cannot easily be replaced without a decent amount of efforts.<p>Initial laziness now adds up.
Even if you hosted your own server and it was just serving one static file, there are still services you depend who could cause an outage.<p>Heroku so far has not had major outages.<p>And they will be learning from the current ones.
I host an app on there that I've been using all day and I didn't notice it go down. I reckon I've got some kind of unplugged-TV poltergeist action going on.
I haven't seen an explanation for this, but I could be related to ec2 issues today. I'm a heroku user. Downtime with any host always seems to happen with bad timing, during a daily client call today. However I'm not concerned about heroku - yet... I think they have less downtime than I would have doing it myself.