

Ask HN: What's the status of Heroku? (and other Rails hosting questions) - matt1

This is a followup to a previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=272031) where I asked about Rails hosting options. I'll be at a point soon with my app where I want to deploy it and am taking another look at my choices. Unfortunately, my sysadmin skills are very much lacking and while I want to learn, that's not a priority right now. That pretty much eliminates sites like Slicehost unless I want to pay someone to configure it. (I plan to learn, but taking the time to do that now will add several months onto my timeline, which I want to avoid).<p>I'm looking for a managed host and my research has led me to HostingRails and Heroku.<p>My initial impression of those two sites are:<p>Heroku - Very easy to set up and use, though I've read that they add a banner to your page unless you sign up for a premium account. I'd happily sign up and pay for one, but I don't see an option for that anywhere. Also, the fact that their site hasn't been updated in months worries me a little (correct me if I'm wrong). I'd love to support a YC company and their service looks great, but I'm hesitant.<p>HostingRails, compared to Heroku, takes a little bit more work to configure, but seems like a pretty good choice. A lot of the negative reviews are years old so its hard to tell whether the downtime issues that some complained about have been resolved. Their homepage guarantees 99.9% up time, which makes me believe that the issues are not longer major concerns. That being said, I worry that some of the positive reviews are actually staff, some parts of their website are a little sloppy, and they make you pay for a year in advance.<p>What do you guys (and gals!) think? Are there any other options I should consider?<p>Appreciate the help. (PS: I bought a Macbook yesterday per HN's advice and love it already -- thanks for the pointers!)
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ph0rque
Your concerns with heroku are non-issues. The banner is a semitransparent one
that adds an edit button to take you to the online editor for your app. You
can configure it to not show
([http://groups.google.com/group/heroku/web/heroku-toolbar-
set...](http://groups.google.com/group/heroku/web/heroku-toolbar-settings)).
Also, they are very much active in their development: check the google group
postings to see what I mean.

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qhoxie
You should really consider EngineYard (<http://www.engineyard.com/>). They are
run by a group of really bright and genuinely nice people.

The founder, Ezra, is around HN as ezmobius.

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matt1
Thanks, but a bit expensive for some just getting started, no?

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qhoxie
It is expensive. Perhaps consider starting on Heroku and moving the EY later
on. If you read testimonials, there are some really amazing stories that show
why EY is worth the money. Things like messages from EY helping people with
optimizations and tracking down problems in their code.

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drcode
My experiences with heroku has been very positive so far: The online IDE and
tools are very robust and they've been responsive to me when I needed to ask
questions.

I don't think you'll be disappointed.

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sunkencity
It's not that hard to host a rails app yourself with apache + mysql +
mod_rails.

Just rent linux server and install apache, mysql and ruby, then "gem install
passenger" and follow the instructions.

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sc
I do as much browsing in WebKit as possible. Heroku does not support WebKit
and till it does I cannot spend too much time with it.

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matt1
Judging from the first few comments, it seems like I'll give Heroku a go. As
always, thanks for the tips.

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echair
99.9% uptime is not that great, actually, if you do the math. That's a 44
minute outage every month.

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cstejerean
Which is not at all bad for a site that's just starting.

