

Heroku: Announcing Huge Growth and New CEO - alexyim
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/10/15/announcing_huge_growth_and_new_ceo/

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maryrosecook
Their deployment is beautifully simple. The fact that they host several of my
mini-apps makes me extremely grateful. But, the chances I will ever actually
give them money are remote: their plans are scarily expensive. I'd rather
spend 20 bucks a month on Slicehost and suffer the irritation of doing my own
deployment.

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colinplamondon
I don't see how it's expensive at all.

We have 10k/month coming in from our iPhone app and use Heroku + S3 for
everything. It lets us focus on getting our product up to speed instead of
system administration, period. If's only expensive if your time is worthless,
or you really, really want to pay a sysadmin to take care of your server
stuff.

Right now we're paying them $200/month and I smile every time I get the bill-
it's one of my favorite expenses because of how much time it saves. When we
get up to 5k, it's still a no-brainer. At 10k, it's time to start looking at
Rackspace, but that's about the limit of things for us.

It works, it saves time, and it lets us focus on improving our product.

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z8000
What is your iPhone app?

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colinplamondon
Free Books- deep title, I know :)

<http://freebooksapp.com>

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swombat
I'm still not quite convinced what need they fulfill, other than making it
easy to deploy small/free apps. Sorry, that's just my impression. Anyone think
differently? Please do correct this view if you think it's wrong.

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transmit101
That's quite a significant itch that they're scratching then. Look at the
figures - 36,000 deployed apps speak for themselves, and the quality of the
platform suggests that the big spike is still to come.

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mark_l_watson
I tried to convince one customer to use Heroku, and we did for a while, but
they ended up paying big $$ to RackSpace. Considering increased
admin/engineering time, I have little doubt that they would have been better
off paying $500/month to Heroku, rather than RackSpace.

Another customer wanted to use Heroku, but we ended up building our own system
using multiple EC2s - again, long term the hosting costs will be much less,
but the admin/engineering costs especially during development were a large
expense.

For my own web portal project? I am using AppEngine (code in
JRuby+datamapper+Sinara, but I am considering a rewrite in Java because of the
superior tool support).

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benofsky
The deployment looks pretty awesome but the plans are outrageously
expensive... is their something I'm missing which causes them to be so
expensive!

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jotto
It is expensive, but i've found the dynos to be quite a bit more powerful than
you'd expect. for instance, i'm getting the same req/sec from 1 dyno as i get
from 3 passengers on REE 187. The CPU speed/rendering time is not as fast
(getting 300ms on Heroku vs 80ms on Linode) - which is likely due to ec2
hardware.

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percept
Thanks--I've been curious about that.

Are there more performance comparisons posted? I saw this:

<http://bit.ly/4GzJdc>

FWIW in that test a Slicehost setup performed better, but only by a small
margin over Heroku's free plan.

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dylanz
We use Heroku a lot. It takes very little time to get a complete environment
up for an application, and we're able to get production products out to test
in the market faster than ever. We ported a Fortune 500 code base onto Heroku
as an experiment, and it basically just ran, dependencies and all.

It's one of those products where until you actually use it, you question why
it even exists. Once I used Heroku, I quickly realized the pain it was saving
me from.

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nbrochu
Great news! I host a lot of my stuff on Heroku and have had a great experience
so far. Deploying with a git push is pretty satisfying!

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dpnewman
I have been using free acct for staging. I could not use service for deploy as
we're using sphinx, plus will be processing incoming emails. The lack of total
customization is the barrier -- but if that changes the overall fluidity of
the service is incredibly appealing.

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bham
I'd love to see AMQP support. It's listed as "SOON".

I'd like some way of having one hanging request talk to another. A crude way
of doing "long polling" I suppose.

How would you implement two-player chess on Heroku for instance in its current
form?

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nakajima
You could always use the database to track games between players.

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z8000
Via polling? No thanks!

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johnnybgoode
A few days ago I posted one potential issue with Heroku:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859544>

Does anyone know if this has changed recently?

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tlrobinson
AFAIK there's nothing stopping you from using Amazon's SimpleDB, especially
since Heroku is already running on EC2.

Also, given the "SQL Databases Don't Scale" by Adam I would be very surprised
if they don't roll out a more "scalable" alternative to Postgres in the near
future.

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drusenko
congrats guys, happy to hear you're continuing to kick ass!

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jcapote
Awesome! Keep rocking, this is the platform of the future for sure...

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abossy
Is there a similar platform for Python?

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tlrobinson
AppEngine is probably the closest.

