

Ask HN: Heroku vs Dotcloud for Django? - boolean

Dotcloud recently changed their pricing plan: http://beta-pricing.dotcloud.com/getting-started/pricing-details/<p>Heroku now also has Django support. Which one do you think is a better choice? I'm also having hard time comparing them in terms of price.
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gabrielgrant
To clarify: the dotCloud pricing hasn't actually changed _yet_ , the new
pricing has been released to a limited group to collect initial feedback, and
will likely be altered before it's official release. That being said, the
general model of differentiating between apps in a development sandbox vs
those in production is likely to stick around.

As for your initial question: dotCloud and Heroku have rather different models
for how applications are built and deployed, but in the end, the amount you
pay for comparable apps will be about the same[1]. Though price is certainly
an important consideration, it is probably not the best way to compare the
two. The real difference is in how much flexibility you need. By making fairly
strong assumptions about the architecture of your application (you will have a
single blob of single-language code as a web front-end, PostgreSQL database,
no local write access, fixed-size memory allocation for containers etc.)
Heroku is able to optimize for apps that fit within those particular
constraints. dotCloud, on the other hand, makes many fewer assumptions about
these types of architectural decisions, leaving more power, but also somewhat
more responsibility, in the hands of the developer.

This difference is a direct result of the two companies' origins: while Heroku
used to be a Rails-only provider and has since opened up to multiple
languages, dotCloud began life as a generic "service" runtime upon which more
technology-specific abstractions have been built.

In short, which one is "better" depends far more on your own particular
requirements than it does on the minor differences in price between the two.

\---

[1]: That is certainly the goal, at least:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860862>

If, for some reason, that doesn't seem to be the case with the newly-proposed
pricing model, that would be very useful feedback to send to
pricing@dotcloud.com (see: <http://beta-pricing.dotcloud.com/Contact/>)

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bmelton
I personally prefer Dotcloud. I don't know if their new pricing model is
rolled out all over, but it basically allows for unlimited 'development' sites
so getting everything up and running should cost nothing until launch (though
it will be memory constrained).

Post-launch, you basically pay for memory usage, so early traction costs very
little, and you don't really have to worry TOO much about pricing until you've
gotten enough traffic to be considered 'social proof'.

Ignoring cost, I can't necessarily compare it too strictly to Heroku as I've
only used Heroku for rails. Anecdotally, Django was one of Dotcloud's
reference applications, and Python support has been there for a lot longer.

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inDesperateZone
Doesn't Heroku allow somewhat unlimited development sites as well? Though the
database limit is even smaller at 5 MB.

