

Engine Yard AppCloud: free 500 hours for new customers - dirtyhand
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/try-appcloud-risk-free/

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andymoe
This hit a nerve for me. I keep going back and looking at Engine Yard Hoping
there will be something there for me but I just can't justify moving from
Heroku for the ruby stuff. They have so many knobs to turn and a nice low
entry point for very small apps that can be cranked up easily. It's this low
barrier to entry that Engine Yard is missing and free for three weeks is not a
substitute for this.

AppCloud seems to be (and I hate to use this word) "just" a thin wrapper
around EC2. At least I get that impression looking at the price points - the
smallest 32bit instance is just shy of 1k/year. Am I going to get more
performance out of three Dynos at Heroku for about the same cost? Maybe maybe
not. But where am I going to put my staging test/servers? On a 20/month VPS?
On an instance @AppCloud that I spin up and down? No, I'll tell you where, I'm
going to stick it on a Dyno or two at Heroku and not worry about it. And then
when I need to scale or the product is ready for production where is it going
to be hosted. That's right - the same place it's been validated and tested on.

By the way, Engine Yard is not the only place that has this barrier to entry
problem. Most of the cloud providers do. Joyent.com, Media Temple, Rackspace
cloud all have Barriers whether it's poor documentation, higher than normal
base costs and bandwidth fees or just inconvenience like having to wait on a
call from someone in Texas in order to be allowed to create instances.

If the other players want to compete with Heroku on the service and ease of
use side or Amazon on flexibility and scale then they are going to have to do
much, much, much better.

~~~
wuputah
Agreed; after using their product for many months, I learned how it is little
better than running your own instances. There are some cool things it does,
but you end up doing plenty of sysadmin work yourself, writing Chef recipes
for anything not supported by their (aging) platform, and then you lose the
benefit of support as well. Did I mention that support costs start at $275
(12/5) or $475 (24/7) a month?[1] Without it, you can't open a ticket.

It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog
posts and on Twitter. It's unprofessional. Compete on features and services,
please.

[1]: <http://www.engineyard.com/products/appcloud/support>

~~~
tmornini_ey
"It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog
posts and on Twitter"

Really? We've always been friendly with everyone in the Rails deployment
space, and I don't ever remember taking shots at Heroku specifically, though
it's certainly possible that we've expressed disagreement on technologies or
practices that they and others may use. I'd appreciate it if you'd point out
what you've seen, as it's certainly not part of our philosophy or business
practice.

With respect to your comment about our "aging" platform, we all age a bit
every day. There's tremendous work underway at Engine Yard, some visible, some
not. This is no-doubt true of every competitive platform. Many of our
customers choose to describe this as maturation! :-)

~~~
sunchild
Yeah, as a long time EngineYard AppCloud customer, I have to defend them a bit
here.

1\. The platform has evolved in a nice, iterative way with no interruptions to
my service.

2\. Even without a support plan, they have some of the best people in the
world answering questions in the forums.

3\. I'm happy to see competition in this space, and I don't begrudge anyone
from pointing out their relative advantages over their competitors.

~~~
wuputah
I am--was--an EY customer as well for some time, about a year, and had been
following it since its inception, particularly through a friend who was a
customer while it was still in beta.

1\. I haven't seen any significant changes to their product, except for the
CLI tool as a replacement for capistrano. The CLI tool is a great improvement,
but it's still basically a glorified capistrano tool, and doesn't even get
close to comparing to the Heroku command-line tool. Predominately, I feel like
the product has been stagnant. Support for Ruby 1.9 and Rubinius (currently in
beta) is the most exciting thing I've seen lately. It's surprising rbx has
taken so long when it's an EY sponsored project!

Part of the challenge with a product like AppCloud is there is no obvious way
to update the stack without disturbing applications, but I'd still have liked
a way to potentially update our base software (libraries and such) to
something more current.

2\. I'm so-so on this. Heroku support is free, but is not 24/7 unless you are
a very large customer with a support contract. We paid for support, and EY
support was sometimes helpful, sometimes not.

3\. I'm not talking about objective comparisons here, these are "shots across
the bow" so to speak. I know the pros and cons of both services very well, but
what I am talking about are "subtle jabs" about how Heroku is not production-
ready/capable, etc.

------
dirtyhand
This is huge for Rails consulting companies. Hopefully we can now convince one
of our clients to switch over to EY AppCloud from Bluehost.

~~~
kwis
I'm surprised by this reaction. It's less than three weeks of hosting. I can't
imagine being meaningfully swayed by that.

~~~
tmornini_ey
No, we don't expect many will make a decision based upon 500 free hours, but
we do expect many will give us a try, and make their decision based upon the
experience they have during their 500 hour trial. :-)

~~~
kwis
Sure. I think it's a potentially effective promotion for exactly the reason
you describe. (free test, and if they're not actively dissatisfied, switching
costs will likely cause them to stick with you.) That's an idea worth testing.

I just can't understand the parent post indicating that it's 'huge for rails
consulting companies'. After all, rails consulting companies are sending out
five digit monthly invoices. A $150 discount on the first month of hosting is
a rounding error in that context.

~~~
drnicwilliams
Ha, that's possibly true as a percentage of total fees. Hopefully the total
fees paid to Engine Yard will always be a rounding error in the context of
consulting fees! :)

We're investigating other benefits for our Development Partners too. Any
thoughts?

