Thank You Heroku, or "How To Eliminate Sysadminning"

<i>Heroku never goes down, and it eliminates the need to pay a sysadmin (or the time value of sysadminning yourself).</i><p>Those are two bold, scary statements.

Not related to the content of the article, but does anyone else get annoyed with sites that put some sort of onclick/mousedown handler on their links, presumably to track outbound clicks or something related?<p>This overrides the middle-click behavior of my browser to open the link in a new tab. I'm trying to open your outbound link in a new tab so I can continue to read your content AND later read the page being linked to; the analytics being surreptiously added to every link overrides and prevents this.

Heroku is great, no doubt about that. My only issue is the 'guilt factor': almost all of my use of Heroku has been for free (my cookingspace.com web site that I use to monitor my diet because I take blood thinners; test deploying prototypes; used it to write 3 articles about Heroku for DevX).<p>I have had poor results getting customers to use Heroku. I tried twice, and both times the extra cost over running your own EC2 instances convinced my customers to eventually spend much more money having me set up custom infrastructure - not a good decision unless you expect to have a very high volume site (I hope they are not reading this :-)

I'm intrigued by Heroku (and EY Cloud), but the thing that really freaks me out is how they charge for every little extra thing. I love the idea of a turnkey solution for Rails deployment and cloud scalability, but for me personally I don't think I would do a startup on it because the value proposition is squeezed from both sides.<p>On the low-end I can get a VPS for $10-$20 month and get a Rails app up and running for a significant number of users with just that modest outlay. I can install SSL and any software I want and have a predictable amount of resources to play with. Yes, there is some sysadmining overhead, but setting up Nginx w/ passenger is like an hour of work once you've been through it a couple times, and similarly a lot of the add-ons that Heroku charges a monthly fee for are just a small one-time time investment. When I'm trying to bootstrap something really small the last thing I want is ramping up a significant recurring cash costs just to run some open source software that is really not hard enough to setup or maintain to justify recurring costs.<p>On the high-end when I'm using a lot of server resources, I'm paying a growing premium for a given amount of resources. Now don't get me wrong, it's nice to be able to magically adjust for traffic spikes, but if I have a consistently high amount of traffic, once again I'm paying a high recurring cost for actual resources that are a fraction of the cost, <i>especially</i> if I need any add-ons which are not inherently resource-intensive—maybe I'm actually just paying for SaaS of essentially open-source components. Actually I have this problem with EC2 and S3 in general to some extent, though much less so than with Heroku because the markup is lower and I've still got a large degree of control.<p>The benefit of Heroku is that they maintain an up-to-date and well-tuned Rails stack w/ add-ons on top of EC2. There is definitely value there. But in all cases there is this downside of overhead and flexibility. The clincher for me is that ultimately Heroku may end up not supporting something I need that would be trivial open-source stuff on any UNIX VPS. At that point I will need to migrate off of Heroku and all those supposed sysadmin costs hit me full in the face all at once rather than being amortized over the life of the project. Maybe I'm just turning into a cranky old man (at 31!), but VPS or dedicated servers still seem like a better value considering all risk factors. If I had VC money and was trying to ramp something up really fast I might reconsider.

A bit off topic, but JumpPost (the site launched on Heroku that this article refers to) looks an awful lot like you ripped RentHop's design. You guys thinking about changing that anytime soon? <a href="http://www.renthop.com/list" rel="nofollow">http://www.renthop.com/list</a> <a href="http://jumppost.com/apartments" rel="nofollow">http://jumppost.com/apartments</a>

I tried installing spree the other day, a rails shopping app, and I gave up after entering gem dependency hell and the no local file policy. Went faster on my own server with nginx+passenger.

Anyone have experience with this vs amazon AWS? (amazon seems to be cheaper)

Is there something like heroku for django apps? :)

I like Heroku, but it seems overpriced for most situations.<p>In particular, I think it's an issue that there's no decrease in cost for dynos (though I be for extremely large sites there's special pricing). Because of this and because you get a freebie, dyno pricing is actually a little progressive (ie. your average cost/dyno increases as you get more dynos).<p>If you have 2 dynos, you're paying for one at ~$36/month, so your average cost per dyno is $18. If you have 11 dynos, you're paying for 10 for a total of $360/month, which is an average of $32.73/dyno-month.

I'm seriously considering Heroku, for my test/learning projects, and am willing to pay a little. Blossom and Koi are good for me.<p>But one thing that is making me think about VPS instead of Heroku is the ability to run multiple apps from one VPS unless I really need the power.<p>Does Koi allow you to run multiple Rails apps/websites per Koi, or is it 1 per Koi?

I've been considering using Heroku for my one-man side project , simply because I do not have the time to attend to both development and system administration. I'm aware that it's more expensive, but when your time is precious, I suspect it will be well worth the extra investment.

Add php support pretty please