
Heroku Class Action - jeremyjarvis
http://herokuclassaction.com
======
aneth4
My startup is heavily invested in and tied to Heroku. We don't have the
resources right now to get off of the platform quickly, but plan to as soon as
possible.

Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and
searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not
eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our
fault.

While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit -
which is just grossly unproductive - my confidence in heroku has been
shattered and I am embarrassed to have chosen and advocated for them for so
long. I look forward to getting off their platform for good, and there is no
way I could recommend it to others for similar applications.

Heroku's most recent statement does nothing to resolve the issue for most of
their customers, and does not reduce what is clearly a gross overpricing and
misrepresentation of what they provide.

It's quite clear that Heroku is not just a bad, but a horrible choice for
rails applications that are not carefully designed for concurrency and don't
go against Heroku recommendations and use a concurrent application server.

~~~
lsc
So, uh, what was the thought process when choosing a PAAS provider? I mean,
step back for a moment, and ignore the specifics of Heroku; they are a PAAS
provider with no completely compatible competitors, is that not so?

Whenever I choose service providers (or choose to outsource services) my first
thought is "what happens if I have to switch away from them?" Even if you
think my first rule of business is too cynical, everyone has problems, and if
you are locked into a provider while they are having problems, well, you have
a problem.

I mean, PAAS seems like a great idea for people who want to write apps but not
be sysadmins. But personally? I don't understand why anyone would sign up with
a PAAS provider that was unique. I mean, if you have to re-write your app to
change providers, you are locked in, in a terrifying way.

~~~
aneth4
That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition.
Something like Google Apps has more lock-in than others. Some like Heroku are
attractive because they have features not available elsewhere that would take
a lot of resources to reproduce.

We chose heroku and Rails for the reasons you suggest, and even tried to avoid
major tie-ins to the platform. That doesn't mean it's trivial to move to
another platform.

~~~
lsc
> That's certainly a consideration, but every PAAS is "unique" by definition.

I don't see how this is true.

There is nothing about PaaS that says there can't be compatible competitors.
Hell, there have been PHP shared hosting platforms that were very nearly
identical between providers for a decade before anyone started saying PaaS,
and really, the "Innovation" that made shared hosting PaaS lies in per-usage
billing.

------
marcamillion
Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and
lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit
that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt
team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells
no.

I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very
disappointed.

I applaud them for raising this issue, and doing all the research they did. We
are all much better off for it.

I applaud them for sticking to their guns to make sure Heroku fixes the issue.

But if they join this class action suit, in my humble opinion, it is one step
too far. What is the max they can realistically expect to get back from
Heroku? $250K? $500K? Surely not the entire $20K/mo, so I doubt it will be
that much.

Given all the money they have raised so far, if I were one of their investors
I would start to ask questions about if they are wasting their time
frivolously beating a dead horse.

This is getting into 'bad karma' territory. I am sure someone, at some point,
will want to sue RapGenius....they may remember how they behave now.

So yes, keep up the pressure, and keep forcing Heroku to fix their faulty
systems.

But a class action suit dawg? I think not.

~~~
gamblor956
Heroku is owned by SalesForce, a publicly-traded multi-billion dollar company.
It has annual revenues in the hundreds of billions.

They have the resources to handle the suit and fix the "damn problems" at the
same time.

~~~
bcgraham
Salesforce does $3-4b in annual revenue.

------
redthrowaway
Polemic though this site may be, my understanding of the situation leads me to
believe that it makes no false claims.

If this is so, Heroku has a problem on its hands: its behaviour is such that
it has alienated current customers and, more importantly, dissuaded potential
future customers from employing the platform.

Heroku's challenges seem threefold:

One, they need to get their infrastructure in line with their branding, or
vice versa.

Two, they need to assuage the doubts of current customers and offer them
convincing reasons to stay.

Three, their image and reputation have taken a nosedive. I can't see well-
informed potential customers considering Heroku without taking this saga into
consideration. This would appear to be the most difficult, and the most
important, challenge to solve. Heroku needs image rehabilitation in a big way.
The only way I can see them achieving that goal is through increased honesty
and engagement with their potential customer base. Unfortunately, I haven't
seen anything from them that suggests they're adopting that strategy.

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resu_nimda
Wow, seriously? This is way over the top and unnecessarily snide
("Heroku...supposedly assists web application developers"). Stop Heroku?
Pretty sure nobody's gonna get on board with that.

What is it even trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it's essentially an
ad for that law firm.

~~~
cracell
While I agree this does seem to just be a law firm trying to make some money,
Heroku did directly lie to developers about Cedar stack's routing being
"intelligent" when it is indeed random.

New Relic's plugin was pretty quickly updated to include the missing time
after the rapgenius article came out. But that doesn't excuse Heroku from
lying about what they were selling and so far they've done nothing to make
amends for those lies.

~~~
rdegges
The misleading documentation that started all the controversy was about
Heroku's legacy Bamboo stack, not the new Cedar stack.

The Cedar stack (which Heroku has been encouraging people to use for a long
while now) has always claimed to do random routing.

~~~
redguava
This isn't true. Their main "how it works" page claimed intelligent routing
with no mention of which stack. This has been changed since the uproar. There
are other places the same.

This is only part of the whole story as well.

------
thetrumanshow
Dear Heroku, slice off a piece of your offering that shows some love to the
Ruby community again. Lets call it the Maple stack. Have this stack use the
old routing infrastructure.

Edit: To be clear, I do not support this legal action. I do want Heroku to
hear the community, but I don't want it to go this far.

~~~
aneth4
The old bamboo stack has the same old intelligent routing, but the
intelligence is only within each router. When the number of routers increased,
the intelligence stopped mattering because concurrent requests were highly
likely to not be handled by the same router, making the routing effectively
random instead of intelligent.

So what you suggest would be great, but unfortunately not possible.

~~~
wmf
I'll just repeat my previous comment: For $60,000 per month they can't create
a mode where all your dynos are behind a single HAProxy with "intelligent"
least-connections load balancing?

~~~
thetrumanshow
In other terms: "Damn, the hallways in this building are getting too crowded,
lets add some more hallways and shit and lets add new rooms... Later: damn,
this is getting complicated. Peopke are piling up in doorways, theyre losing
patience and leaving (or being forced to leave to ease the congestion)... Wish
there was something we could do!"

Wmf: "Build another building, geeez!"

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outside1234
oh look, a parasitic lawyer-company trying to suck some money out of a
technology company. it must be a day that ends in -y.

~~~
stevenp
You honestly don't believe that, if the allegations are true, Heroku has done
something wrong?

~~~
zanny
I'd rather see everyone move away from Heroku than waste everyones time and
money on the legal system, personally. The only ones who would win in a
business class joint suit case would be the lawyers on both sides.

------
Bradosaur
This isn't some grassroots action lead by startup CTOs across the valley. This
is just a lawyer searching for a lead plantiff. I find the site rather
misleading, and ultimately trashy. (Disclaimer: I am personally opposed to
class action lawsuits.)

------
pg
Interestingly, someone tried to spam a bunch of comment threads with this a
few days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit>

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goronbjorn
Is this in any way affiliated with Rap Genius? In either case, you should make
it abundantly clear where you stand, as they're very publicly involved with
this spat.

~~~
biot
From the Wired article, it appears the law firm is fishing for a lead
plaintiff: <http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/>

------
tlrobinson
General question: do class action lawsuits need to be sponsored/initiated by
an actual plaintiff, or can lawyers just start a bunch of class actions hoping
one will eventually stick and they'll get some fees out of them?

Edit: s/defendant/plaintiff/

~~~
sachingulaya
The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several
named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class. The proposed class must
consist of a group of individuals or business entities that have suffered a
common injury or injuries. Typically these cases result from an action on the
part of a business or a particular product defect or policy that applied to
all proposed class members in a typical manner. After the complaint is filed,
the plaintiff must file a motion to have the class certified. In some cases
class certification may require discovery in order to determine its size and
if the proposed class meets the standard for class certification. Upon the
motion to certify the class, the defendants may object to whether the issues
are appropriately handled as a class action, to whether the named plaintiffs
are sufficiently representative of the class, and to their relationship with
the law firm or firms handling the case. The court will also examine the
ability of the firm to prosecute the claim for the plaintiffs, and their
resources for dealing with class actions.

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action>

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zdgman
Can we please get this site hosted on Heroku for the irony?

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jwrubel
Attorney 'Values' page includes stock photo of corporate jet. Aaaaand we're
done here, folks. <http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php>

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wheaties
wtf is this? No one will get money from this. Last time I checked I got a .06
payout from some company that supposedly defrauded me of over $60. Quite a
payout. Lawyers took 30% right off the top. Hmm.. maybe someone will make
money.

------
jyap
Anyone else spot the "I see what you did there?" with the Notes screen shot?

[http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-
with-...](http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-its-
promises.php)

That dig makes it personal.

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orangethirty
This is why you don't fuck around with PR issues. They can easily turn into
lawsuits.

~~~
socalnate1
This is America, everything can easily turn into a lawsuit.

Even if Heroku had handled the PR issue perfectly, it's very likely some
enterprising lawyer would still be looking to sue.

~~~
orangethirty
True, but they would not have had to deal with a bunch of pissed off
customers.

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NicoJuicy
It's to technical... I don't see a reason why you'd win.

Lies happen all the time, i saw someone here mention that Heroku didn't knew
it was such a big deal.

They are expanding a lot, the issue (intelligent routing) has been raised and
will be solved. They know what they've done wrong now... They didn't see it as
a big issue before.

It's up to Heroku to resolve the problem, because at the end of the day it's
an issue to be fixed.

And don't we see issues all the time in software development.

As long as the company itselves communicate about the problem and is honest
about it when the problem comes up.

That's the only thing i would really care.

PS. I'm not associated (employed or client) by Heroku.

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mark_l_watson
Sorry in advance for being a little off topic here: which VPS hosting
companies have the best reputation for automatically restarting your failed
VPS (for any reason) from the most recent backup? Many years ago, I was on
vacation without an Internet access and my host provider restarted my instance
and since I set up my services to start on boot up, all was good.

I would guess that I am a typical customer who does not really need fast
scalability. I host several web apps with a modest number of users and what I
care most about is reliability and then cost.

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reddit_clone
Ahh.. the smell of blood in the water!

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methodin
Do class action lawsuits actually have any effect on business practices? Just
seems like an extortion that is somehow legal. No one benefits but the
lawyers. Recently I've been included in a bunch unbeknownst to me that require
me to submit written notes within a week of notice to NOT be included. Why
can't we just eliminate the middleman in these cases to cause real change?

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makerbreaker
This must be the Kim Kardashian of law firms.

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uid
It is going to be interesting when this gets to discovery, and we find out
what Heroku were saying internally this entire time about the issue. There are
bound to be internal emails that discuss this issue and what to do (or not to
do) about it. For this reason I can see this being settled. Perhaps refunds
and an apology.

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endianswap
This is interesting, because I don't remember any similar class action
lawsuits/attempts like this in the tech/SAAS sector, though I've often heard
of threats. Have there been any similar attempts?

~~~
CamperBob2
Right now there are a lot more lawyers in the US than there is honest work for
them.

Not hard to see what's coming.

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the_cat_kittles
Is there a similar service that is better than Heroku that anyone would
recommend switching to?

~~~
tracker1
Depends on your platform... AppFog.com supports a few...

