
You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku - _pius
http://railstips.org/2009/11/8/you-re-an-idiot-for-not-using-heroku
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kalendae
I honestly never truly understood the value of services like engineyard and
heroku (more accurately i guess i think i understand the value but am
surprised by why so many would need it). It is quite a price premium you pay
to save yourself from doing something that is pretty simple -- deploying
rails, at the cost of losing full control. When I had to use engineyard for a
client, I was really shocked by the prices and while they were really fast on
support I just found it tedious to have to get someone else to try something
that doesn't fit entirely into their 'optimized' stack of things.

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jshen
you save a lot more than just deploying rails. You no longer have to
administer a server, and don't under estimate how much work that is. You can
create a server and maybe get away with administering it for a year or two,
but eventually it will bite you in the ass.

The question people have to ask themselves is at what point is the cost of
these services greater than the cost of administering their own servers. My
feeling is that these services are great if you're running a small to medium
site. If you have a large site, or run lots of small sites, or some
combination, then you're probably better off doing it yourself.

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nir
Ah yes, the friendly, thoughtful tone so commonly associated with Rails-
related discussion :)

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_pius
The article actually is quite thoughtful and friendly ... ya know, if you
actually _read_ it. ;)

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nir
I did read it. I have no problem with the article (and I actually think both
Heroku and RoR are brilliant), but the title is so DHH-like I couldn't
resist.. I hope you don't take any offense, honestly none intended.

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jshen
sadly, these types of titles are the way to get on the front page of sites
like this.

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amackera
I don't know Ruby, or Rails. I guess I'm an idiot :(

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peregrine
No, but Heroku is pretty well known as a Ruby on Rails hosting service. Its
had several articles available here on HN and has quite a bit of hype. Just
saying, you are probably not an idiot. :)

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z8000
You can certainly run Sinatra on Heroku, not just rails.

There's no way to implement a Comet solution on Heroku as far as I can
determine. Please tell me I'm wrong!

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z8000
Also, this post shows someone that has gotten taken by how easy deployment is
on Heroku. It's good but the article mentions that the author took another
look "yesterday". Still riding that high.

Please stop using emotionally charged words like "awesome" to describe
something. It's pointless but then again I'm referring to an article that
calls me names. Heh.

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jnunemaker
Awesome comment.

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bham
save cleverness for reddit please :)

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gexla
I'm an idiot for so many reasons that not using Heroku doesn't even break into
my top ten list. As such, I'm not terribly worried about not using Heroku. In
any case, thanks for reminding me that I'm an idiot.

Actually, I have used Heroku. The major con of the service is that you are
losing control to Heroku which also loses control to Amazon's EC2 service (for
example, inability to assign multiple IP addresses to an instance leads to
$100 / month extra if you need secure pages.) The major pro for me is the ease
of getting into it. Just a quick signup and a free level for getting started.

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spudlyo
You're an idiot if you're willing to pay a middle man to deploy and manage
your application's software stack.

~~~
raganwald
And you're also an idiot if you pay someone else to change the oil in your
car.

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grandalf
Does Heroku allow Ruby 1.9 ?

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_pius
Not yet, at least not for general customers.

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joeycfan
When Heroku was new I tried to move my site to it and it refused to do a
migration that required a helper.

I checked carefully and it worked fine on my computer.

I wrote them about it and never got an answer.

I waited and they never fixed it so I went with a host.

Appertainly they've fixed it but I'm happy where I am.

www.jgsbws.com

