Heroku and the promise of no systems administration sound tempting, but...<p>Is the uptime satisfactory? It's worrying that Heroku's Standard production databases at $50 or more a month have "up to one hour of downtime per month" (https://heroku.com/pricing)<p>How about support? The standard free support mentions "1+ day response times", which sounds a lot worse than what e.g. Linode offers.<p>Are page speeds okay?<p>Do you have personal experience with high-traffic sites running on Heroku? The reason I ask is that I seem to recall someone mentioning here on HN in an earlier discussion that Heroku is alright for smaller sites, but not for high-traffic ones.<p>Does Heroku offer any value for people who know how to set up servers but are inexperienced with larger setups / load-balancing?
I personally like them. They are a great service for developer who want something that will just work.<p>Uptime they are good no noticeable problems and the network speeds are excellent. They are actually built upon amazon cloud.<p>The downside is the cost. Yes, they get your app up and running with little to no maintenance but you do pay for the privilege.<p>Personally I use heroku as a development and deployment platform before moving it to a cheaper solution once I have the time.<p>> Does Heroku offer any value for people who know how to set up servers but are inexperienced with larger setups / load-balancing?<p>Yes! time is money, so even if you know how to setup a server having it all automated is a massive time saver.<p>That being said as you scale so will the cost. At some point you will want to move provider and then you will be in the situation of still having to setup and run your platform.
I deployed many apps on Heroku including but not limited to: Ruby/Rails, Python/Flask&Django, Ring/Clojure, Node.js/vanilla without framework&Express(I haven't tried Hapi there, but yes Heroku support it), PHP/vanilla without framework.. I want to say they are so good at letting you deploying all different kinds of languages/framework at ease.<p>One caveat is that Heroku is a ephemeral filesystem on each Dyno. So if you want to save the file content on the fly, you probably also need to use services like AWS S3. One time in a hackathon I tried to deployed a shared proxy for letting different users share the same html DOMs, and I need to save all the resources user requested from remote server. Since the time limit I just completely switch the site to be hosted on elastic beanstalk (because I never tried Heroku with S3 before). Using Heroku + S3 is actually easy, later I found out. But having to use another storage host might be something you want to know ahead before you try heroku.<p>>> Are page speeds okay?<p>It's very slow for the first request, if your site haven't been visited for a while. ("If your application is unused for a while it gets unloaded from the server memory" Quoted from Stackoverflow.) But afterwards I find it fast enough. But that also depends very much on your backend service and infrastructure, so I can't make any promise even though my guess would be it will be okay.<p>>> Is the uptime satisfactory?<p>Yes from my experience. I only had very few downtime. One experience I learnt in the hard way is at least have some mechanisms to alert yourself when the site is down. (So you can get up in 3am to fix the issue!!!)<p>>> Do you have personal experience with high-traffic sites running on Heroku?<p>How high is your traffic?<p>>> Heroku and the promise of no systems administration sound tempting, but...<p>I love their Add-ons. For example, simple things like a scheduler makes the automation so easy.
Heroku certainly is a huge time saver. And you certainly can build high traffic apps if you use a stateless and reactive frameworks like Play, Vert.x or Node.js. Even within the free limits.