

What's the deal with Heroku? - philip1209

Can someone please explain the advantages of Heroku to me? It seems like one of those in-the-know companies. I'm not sure I understand how their scaling works and who they are targeted at. I currently host my apps in Rackspace, and would love to try something new, but don't necessarily understand the advantages.
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dpritchett
Heroku makes the most sense if you aren't running your app and your database
on the same server. It's particularly easy to scale if your app doesn't
contain any state in and of itself - just spin up a few copies that point to
your database (which you can also scale up with a paid provider like MongoHQ).

For an example, I have a single-server app running on Rackspace with a same-
server MongoDB. I pushed the web app to Heroku, now all I need to do is set up
a connection to MongoDb (either via MongoHQ at $20-50/mo or with a hand-
secured connection back to my existing database) and now I can stop worrying
about Nginx and Apache and whatnot. If my load grows I can spin up extra web
server instances or increase the resources allocated to my DB server.

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caw
5 days late, so hopefully someone answers -- If you run your web stack on
Heroku, and your database in another provider, doesn't that introduce a ton of
latency for your DB queries? I thought that you should strive to host in the
same datacenter to minimize the latency.

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eurleif
They're in the same data center, because they both run on top of EC2.

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saiko-chriskun
the advantages are that it requires /zero/ effort to host and scale. takes
server admin out of the equation. my main beef with 'em is that their downtime
is pretty bad.

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amalag
What is your app?

