

A Letter to Heroku - Please Tier the Dynos - kentf
http://kent.io/post/31308594877/heroku-please-tier-your-platform

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ericf
They do seem to prioritize paying customer, particularly during outages.

<https://status.heroku.com/incidents/151>

"We prioritize getting top-paying customers back online over our larger base
of free users, which is why customers (particularly those with dedicated
databases) were back online much more quickly than free apps. While we think
this prioritization makes sense, we do strive to provide a high level of
service to everyone. Even though the outage was much shorter (less than 16
hours in most cases) for our top customers than for our free users (as much as
3 days in some cases), we measure our downtime as the time it took to get 100%
of apps back online."

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kentf
Thanks for the link. Makes me feel better :)

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d0m
I've never really give heroku a chance.. because of the cheap price of
20$/month for a linode. I once was tempted to use it for a contract but I felt
there are so much cheaper and good alternatives..

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thinkbohemian
You get 512mb of Ram for free on Heroku. 1024mb of ram for $36 per month. How
much does $20 buy you on linode, and how much is your time worth?

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d0m
What annoys me is that on Heroku, if I need more "Web dynos" or more "Worker
dynos", the price climbs _really_ fast. I.e. From that page,
<http://www.heroku.com/pricing#24-24> it costs 1500$/month... whereas on my
Linode, I can do whatever I want, add as much database/workers/web server as I
want, and the price is still 20$.

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azarias
Paying customer here. I hope they don't do that. If you consider a dyno to be
a unit of some set of resources, having a free dyno tells you exactly what to
expect. Although most apps do not scale as a linear multiple of the number of
dynos you have due to other bottlenecks, the resources you have increase
linearly. So, having a single unit of resources to try out is a really great
model that would give you some peace of mind in scaling.

After all, most successful apps will quickly outgrow their free dyno (and that
is without even considering at least an additional dyno for background
services).

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Smudge
Free dynos shut off after inactivity (~30 minutes in my experience). So you're
probably subsidizing a lot less than you think, since most production apps
have scaled beyond the free tier.

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kentf
Good insight. I still think that having them tiered would make more sense.
More curious as to why they aren't.

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Smudge
Customer acquisition, I would think. The cost to them is very small compared
to the gains they get by attracting so may people with an awesome, simple-to-
use service. Think of it as the "gateway" dyno.

Tiers would just get in the way of the simplicity of their service.

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sync
Are there particular performance issues you are running into? I've been using
Heroku for quite some time and never had any complaints about performance.

You should know that Heroku also automatically shuts down applications running
one dyno after a period of inactivity.

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kentf
Not really. I am really curious as to why they don't. Seems like a natural way
to keep them separate in cases there are performance issues that do arise.

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arbales
I think adding tiers would muddy their service model – the default answer is
/always/ not to do something, adding a feature or constraint should only
happen with a compelling reason.

