

Do you use PaaS to run your web application? - mattwritescode

I am interested in knowing do you use a PaaS provider (such as aws, appengine, heroku) to power your web application, or do you run your services through hosting providers (linode, digitalocean)?<p>What was your reasoning for your choice? Do you believe you have made the right choice in the short and long terms?
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msikkes
Disclaimer: I'm biased because we run a web service that let's you manage your
own servers. But the reason why we created that web service is because of the
reasons below:

For our clients and our own projects we've switched to using our own
servers/VPS's.

I think PaaS is great for getting simple apps up and running that don't have a
lot of external dependencies. However, the PaaS I used (Heroku/EngineYard/AWS)
don't perform good enough compared to VPS or servers at "traditional vendors"
or things like DigitalOcean.

Also, some of our customers need to have their servers in a geographic
location close to home or under national legislation and they don't want to be
dependent on a "massive" infrastructure where they can't just pick up the
phone and call someone.

Also with local vendors. Problems are usually solved more quickly and
communication lines are shorter. You have an answer on a problem much sooner.
It also helps that these local vendors do not have massive infrastructures
that are hard to fix or hard to move in a short manner of time when something
really bad is going on. I have better experience with smaller traditional
vendors in fixing problems than I have with "the big guys".

Heroku, for example, is largely dependent on AWS. If AWS fails somewhere, you
can't just move somewhere else. Because the deployment procedures and
infrastructure is vendor-specific to Heroku. You're kinda locked in. Addons
for external services like Redis, Search daemons, logging, etc. is great for
ease of use. But if some of those hip startups die, don't get funding or they
just have technical/security problems you can't "just move away" because
you're pretty locked in.

The above reasons are some main reasons why we moved to 100% of our own
servers at local vendors. We have some at DigitalOcean and some at TransIP,
which is a Dutch vendor with a long track record and we can by without a
credit card with "regular" Dutch payment methods and contracts.

The main problem with "do it yourself" servers/VPSs seem to be the time and
effort you need to put in to get everything up and running. PaaS services take
care of all this for you. This comes at a price both economically and
technically. If you're fine with that price, than I think PaaS is good for
you.

If you're not "fine" with that price. You run into the problem of reading
through guides, documentation, fiddling with your servers, keeping them
updated, managing security, etc. etc. All kinds of problems you need to solve.

Luckily, there is Managed Hosting at some web services and applications that
takes care of all this. There's stuff like Plesk, DirectAdmin and such. But
they are pretty outdated and not really useful if you're a Rails company.

Luckily, you can use a service that does server/cloud management for you like
Commando.io, IntercityUp.com or Cloud66.

Hope this helps!

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thenomad
Yes, I do - I use WP Engine for hosting all my wordpress sites.

It's turned out to be an excellent business decision, saving me a significant
amount of money.

I wrote a blog post about the whole thing a while ago, actually, talking more
about the comparison: [http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-
after-1...](http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-
after-1-month-and-250k-visitors-is-this-the-best-wordpress-hosting-money-can-
buy/)

Ironically, the site that review is on is one of the few I no longer host with
WP Engine, but I still have something like 10 other WP sites running with
them.

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nslater
I wrote a little about the choice between PaaS and VPS here:

[https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/pets-vs-
cattle](https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/pets-vs-cattle)

My summary here would be that both are good, for different things. If I was
deploying a personal site or a personal app, I would probably go with a VPS,
because it's easier to set up, and can be a lot cheaper. But if scaling or
uptime was a concern, I'd want to go the PaaS route. It comes with a few
upfront costs (configuration, statelessness, price, etc) but is absolutely
worth it in the long term.

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sdnguyen90
IMO PaaS's aren't that expensive for a lot of projects IMO.

The only thing I use VPS's for now is testing. I just do basic security
hardening and call it a day. Not really too worried if anything happens to
these boxes.

I saved A LOT of time switching to PaaS's. Probably 30-40 hours a month. I
don't really touch anything sysadmin related anymore and I'm a lot more
productive.

I don't regret using VPS's because it forced me to learn alot of sysadmin
stuff.

~~~
mattwritescode
And how does cost compare?

