
Ask HN: Heroku or Not? - johnfelix
Hi...My team does not have experience in setting up a server. I mean a production server. We are thinking about using heroku, because it removes the system admin. Heroku is costly compared to the setting up a server. So can you guys please give your opinion about using heroku or not?
Thanks :)
======
moe
Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective.

Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free
plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons.
Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase.

Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking
elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments becomes outright
hilarious above roughly that threshold.

And with hilarious I mean _really_ hilarious, as in the $3500 price point for
a 50G memcached instance. For that money you can also buy a physical server
with 64G RAM every month, fresh from the factory...

~~~
cletus
Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre. RAM is dirt
cheap. I don't get it. It's almost like they all got together and decided to
gouge on the one thing people need. It's this one factor alone that seems to
make dedicated/colocation services a better option at about the point you
mention.

~~~
moe
_Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre._

Not really. DIMM modules are fairly cheap but DIMM slots are not. Your average
mid-range server can, in theory, be maxed out to 192G or even 256G RAM. But
only if you use 8G or even 16G DIMMs - and those are still hideously
expensive.

The most cost efficient configuration usually gravitates around 64G (16x 4G)
nowadays, rarely higher.

So, when you factor in the cost overhead _per server_ (rackspace,
power/cooling, network infrastructure, maintenance) then it's not hard to
understand why RAM is the most expensive ressource in the cloud.

------
angilly
Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server:

$ git push master heroku

is a lot cheaper then:

Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI
1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do
1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe
requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh
make sure to bring up another machine to act as a MySQL slave. You know how to
do that right? And you're dumping your DB to disk and backing up to S3
regularly right. Just write a simple script/cron job to handle that. And when
you setup your machines you made sure to setup 2 so that if one goes down, the
other will still be around, and you setup a load balancer that will realize
when one of those machines goes down right?

etc.... :)

~~~
swombat
Setting up your own server gives you full flexibility as to your application
architecture/tech stack. Want to go with Redis? Tokyo Cabinet? MogileFS? S3? A
pile of files in a zillion small directories? something else? Your choice.

If your startup has any challenging technical elements, I think having 100%
full control over your app architecture is quite important. You can live
without it, but it's a potentially costly trade-off.

~~~
angilly
FWIW, judging by "My team does not have experience in setting up a server" I
doubt OP is going to be playing with any of that stuff.

~~~
swombat
Granted, but if your team doesn't have experience setting up a server, I
question whether they have the required skills to run a startup's technology.
A startup CTO should be able to set up a server reasonably quickly,
effectively, and securely...

------
TylerJewell
I am a Heroku fan. Some things for you to consider: 1) The real value of
Heroku is time savings. Their deployment mechanism is near instant, so your
savings come from the time you are spending doing more development, rather
than managing servers. If you wanted to hire an ops person, that's a cost
savings.

2) Scalability. As your system grows, Heroku manages architecture choices
necessary for scaling all parts of your app. This is at the dyno web tier and
database tier. But it also includes choices around architecting add-ons. For
example, if you wanted to include their memcache add-on and you had multiple
apps, should you create multiple memcache instances or one large grid? That
sort of choice is handled behind the scenes.

3) Add-Ons. They handle configuration, billing, and setup of any add-ons you
might need. Biggest savings is not having to research all of them to figure
out which ones are stable, viable, functional.

4) Cheap to get started. You can deploy new apps for free, and migrate your
code elsewhere if needed.

5) Their polyglot strategy is interesting, and they are pushing the envelope
with beta implementations around nosql data stores. There is a nice polyglot
post on their blog.

6) There is some performance advantages of using some of their add-ons.
Because Heroku is deployed on EC2, and many of the add-ons are also on EC2,
the integrated performance can be higher. EC2 ping rates are faster than
gigabit ethernet in some cases.

7) Creating identical environments. If you manage your own servers and you
need to create staging, QA, or development servers, you'd have to create those
manually and they'd be close, but not identical because there is different
hardware involved. In debugging scenarios, being able to clone a whole app
environment has some advantages.

Good luck in your endeavor.

------
patio11
BCC runs on a slice. A smaller client project runs on Heroku. I find Heroku
requires less maintenance which is easy and more which is hard, like digging
into Ruby gems to hack around why they are not working. By comparison, nginx
configs and a thousand other things need to be done for VPSes, but the
majority are straightforward or Googleable.

Strong recommendation for the DIyer: deprec will save you a week.

------
jacquesm
Heroku is probably really great as long as you are small. Once you get serious
you can host _much_ cheaper on your own machines, but there will be additional
(hidden) costs to factor in because you'll be spending more time on doing all
the stuff that Heroku does for you. That's their added value, super easy
deployment and keeping your stuff up and running. Cost wise it is fine as long
as you're small enough to not notice you bill as a 'significant expense'. When
that happens you should look in to running your own server, maybe first a
virtual one, then move on to a dedicated server. That should allow you to
scale to quite impressive size without breaking the bank.

~~~
amock
Once you get big enough you might be able to negotiate with Heroku for a
better deal. They might not be willing to give you au better deal, but if
you're already there you might as well try before going through the expense of
moving somewhere else.

------
thibaut_barrere
Here's my take:

-> if time is more precious than money, go with Heroku.

-> if money is more precious than time, go with Linode/SliceHost etc.

You can change your mind later on (depending on scale increase cash etc), or
even mix-and-match (eg: your workers on Linode, your front-ends on Heroku).

Last point: some software (eg: sphinx) are not available on Heroku, and some
others (eg: websolr) are quite costly compared to a roll-your-own setup.

~~~
swombat
If money is more precious than time but you have a need for reasonably beefy
servers, go with Hetzner:

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
produktmatrix/)

~~~
bmelton
Maybe a dumb question, but my brief scan over there didn't see US Dollars or
anything in American English. Do they have a US website, location or
affiliate?

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techiferous
Start with Heroku. It's actually quite cheap for low traffic.

At the same time, buy a $20/month Linode. Start playing around with it by
setting up toy web sites and web apps. If you don't have experience setting up
a server, then it's important to be experimenting with one for a long time
because it takes a while to learn things. For example, you not only have to
install and configure all of the necessary software, you have to think about
security and resource utilization (memory, CPU, disk). You also are going to
want to set up some server monitoring software such as serverdensity.com. And
you're going to want to get used to managing web traffic (reading Apache logs,
tuning Apache for performance, etc.). All of this takes time. But if you do
this then if the time comes for you to switch away from Heroku, you will have
experience setting up and managing your own web server.

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atldev
I recently launched a small project (<http://statusdashboard.com>) with the
goal of learning RoR and was blown away by the community and infrastructure
(particularly Heroku). 3 weeks from watching the first blog railscast to a
fucntioning site (with SSL, recurring billing, monitoring, etc.). I've also
setup a VPS and started learning how to host myself (I think it is always
better to understand how the magic happens).

Heroku definitely hides the complexity of their "magic". It just seems to work
so effortlessly.

However, my biggest question so far is this: what is the best practice for
managing and maintaining the DB? I'm used to jumping into the db for routine
tasks, ad-hoc reporting, and troubleshooting. Amazon RDS would make it easier,
but a bit pricy for my needs right now. I also understand you can db pull, but
I've heard a few examples of data loss when attempting a pull/push roundtrip
with a local PostgreSQL instance. So, I find myself spending time in the
Heroku console, manipulating the data in code, manually.

What do you do to manage/report on data in the DB? I'm preparing to launch a
number of larger projects, but need to get a better system in place first.

~~~
eddie_catflap
Hi - as an aside - I think it would be worth adding some 'tour' pages to your
status dashboard site. I like the design but I'm not sure how the site works
etc.

~~~
atldev
Thanks for the feedback. I'll be working on that this weekend. I'm thinking of
including a short video as well.

------
dirtyhand
I've used both Engine Yard Cloud and Heroku. They're both great and have their
pros and cons. Both are also powered by Amazon EC2.

The only major downside with Heroku is if there is any downtime within their
infrastructure, your app will also go down. This has happened a couple of
times in the last 3-4 months, and it took a lot of big sites down.

Engine Yard Cloud setups are self-contained and can be locked down to whatever
setup, cloud version you're happy with. If they update their cloud setup, you
don't have to update your instance anymore.

It also seems like you can get more "bang for your buck" with EY once you
start needing more computing/db power

------
aaronbrethorst
I am totally in favor of Heroku. Like other folks have pointed out, it's far
cheaper (at least at first) to scale up on Heroku than to hire an ops person.
I think that outgrowing Heroku, or finding that your real costs would be lower
by going elsewhere or buying hardware, is a good problem to have.

I would much rather spend my time building my product than dealing with all of
the fiddly bits of managing web servers, databases, full text search setup,
security, patching, etc.

If need arises, migrating off Heroku in the future shouldn't be too
challenging.

Also, if you do choose to try out Heroku, pick up my iPhone/iPad app for
managing your Heroku applications (<http://dopplerapp.com>). Good luck!

~~~
jesselamb
I love Doppler. Thanks for it! :)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Glad you like it! Hit me up at aaron@structlab.com if you have any feature
requests or bugs to report. I have v1.1 in the pipeline right now, and would
like to incorporate a couple more user-suggested changes before I submit to
Apple if possible.

------
mark_l_watson
There is no lock-in using Heroku. Start with it and if you later want to move,
just get a VPS of the appropriate size, apt-get install PostgreSQL, install
RVM, and then the Ruby you want and required gems. Once you do this a few
times, it takes very little time. As another poster mentioned, make sure you
setup cron backups to S3, etc.

------
marshally
Heroku is a great way to get your app up and out there quickly. Get in front
of users and then iterate on your product. The perceived cost of Heroku won't
turn out to be an issue until you've scaled out to many dynos.

Don't fret optimizing your hosting bill until it gets large enough to be an
issue!

------
jarin
I like Heroku, but if you want your own server (so you don't have to pay for
outgoing email or cron jobs or DelayedJob), you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10
server super easily with Moonshine. I gave a talk about it at SD Ruby a while
back.

[http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby-
depl...](http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby-deploying-
rails-apps)

------
joe-mccann
Heroku is awesome for ruby development. If you're attempting node.js
development, they do have a private beta (which I've tested), but is somewhat
limited as I believe it uses an NGINX proxy so doing something like websockets
with node.js (currently on Heroku) is not possible.

git push master heroku

is reason enough to give it a shot.

Joyent may be another option...

~~~
aaronblohowiak
joyent is nice and their support is tops

------
andrewvc
Use Heroku. The cost of acquiring or hiring the sysadmin knowledge is going to
far exceed just using Heroku. This includes Heroku's main competitor,
Engineyard.

EY has its upsides (and downsides), but definitely requires more sysadmin
experience.

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yogsototh
We did all manually before. Now we use heroku. For a small/medium sized
project it is just perfect. We replaced about 1 to 2 days of works by 10
minutes with heroku. I cannot recommend it enough.

It took only 3 hours to adapt our projects to heroku. Compared to many days
working on hosting ourselves our projects. Because the longer is not to set up
the environment but to choose what will be the best. I believe the heroku team
made the best choice for me.

------
paulsingh
Heroku's definitely easier to setup and use - it's usually the right choice
when you're first starting out and/or you don't have any advanced needs.

I don't use it much anymore - I stick to Moonshine and the Rackspace Cloud.
The setup and management of a private slice is super easy and, IMHO, it's
worth the small amount of extra work to setup.

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msie
I think the most important thing is getting something up and running quickly
because you don't know where the design of the system will lead and you don't
need the distraction of setting up a server. Don't waste more than a week
fretting over this issue. Even a week is too much! During development you can
still consider this issue so it's not an either-or thing. You're still
developing in rails and can easily move your system to a standalone server.
You're just delaying the cost of hiring a system admin or training one while
you spend your valuable time in creating a working system which is very
valuable in terms of figuring out the design of it.

------
consultutah
Heroku is great for site that might work out and might not. The initial cost
is zero, but you can scale out as needed. Hopefully youve structured your
business properly so that herokus cost is a small percentage of revenue.

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jarrold
Heroku is awesome. Not only does it work well, it also encourages best
practices.

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logandk
Although I love Heroku, and it really is a great platform, I find that, for my
startup and personal projects, the costs hold me back from doing some things.

Say I need to run a simple background job, that would be $36/month - almost 2
linodes. And with the excellent articles on <http://articles.slicehost.com>, I
find that setting up a vps takes no more than a few hours. Plus, it's a lot of
fun and a good learning experience!

I don't see how Heroku could do it much cheaper though, when you look at the
pricing of Amazon EC2 instances which their platform runs on.

------
DanielRibeiro
Heroku is great. But, if you use something a bit outside ruby/add-ons (which
is a lot, including NoSql databases, Apigee, and lots of other great
services), you will need to move.

~~~
perezd
Actually, Heroku supports all the popular NoSQL databases out of the box via
their addon system.

------
friendstock
definitely use heroku if you are using a ruby framework. we've had a much
better experience than with managing our own EC2 server or using RightScale

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chuhnk
Im a sys admin and have to administrate dedicated servers at work but choose
to use heroku for personal projects just for ease of deployment.

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gunmetal
I recommend heroku for starting out and and getting your apps some traction or
whatever, then if/when you make more money hire a sys admin and migrate to
something else if you want.

I really love heroku though, especially after setting up my own servers on
media temple for rails apps (which sucks using passenger).

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waratuman
Use Heroku is the simple answer. Unless you have specific needs for background
processing or do some stuff that is not in Ruby, use Heroku. This is
especially true if you have not set up a production system before.

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waxman
Definitely go with Heroku for two reasons: time savings (no sysadmin is huge!)
and flexibility (you can always migrate later, which is easy since almost all
of their stack is open-source).

------
swilliams
Question about heroku: I know that they have delayed_job support, but I need
something that will kick off a DJ call every 5 minutes or so. The hourly cron
add-on just won't cut it.

~~~
patio11
Really easy with DJ, but hackie: jobs create jobs, set run_at to five minutes
in future. Optionally, similarly created batch of twelve with hourly cron.

------
grinich
Come ask James at Startup Bootcamp :-)

<http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/#speakers>

------
points
If you don't have experience in setting up a server, wtf not? Learn it. It's
kinda useful.

