

Ask HN: Heroku or AWS or? - bryang

I&#x27;m currently in the development phase of my new venture and looking to compare services. My site revolves around text tables and a very limited amount of images (none uploaded by users). I do NOT expect to have 50k users within 6 months of launch, but there is a possibility it may happen. Within a couple years however, I do hope to be in that 100k+ range.<p>So, what do you fine folks recommend?<p>Looking forward to hear your thoughts, thanks!!!
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mmenafra
Hey,

So I understand there can be hassle on how setup your own VPS Server on
services like amazon, etc... but sticking to Heroku still isn't that cheep
either.

If you have your Heroku app "production Ready" you might still be costing you
200 bucks a month.

Also Heroku isnt as stable and performant as for example amazon server. I
migrated my app out of heroku to Amazon and got a 5X increase in performance
while spending the same money I did on heroku, not to mention you have more
controller over your servers where you can play around and increase performace
even more.

And don't worry about setting up your own servers in amazon, Now youcan use
OpsWork for deploying your apps, and its like having heroku on Amazon servers
plus Root access to them.

cheers

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mhuang511
I think it depend on how much you want to tweak the server and which framework
you use.

For me, I use Zend Framework and AWS. So far so good and AWS release my
loading effort in maintaining the whole system.

In my monthly bill, the most expensive AWS service was EC2 and RDS.

FYI: AWS Free Usage Tier charge me less then $1 every month during my
development phase.

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z3bra
Once you want to scale and go big, you might want to use AWS, until that
moment it's a matter of how much you want to tweak the server.

SUper powers and full customization --- > LINODE Deploy + Deal with it
acttitude to the server guys ----> Heroku

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artellectual
Start out with Heroku, so you don't have to waste time configuring and
managing servers. You can learn all that stuff once you start to scale. Then
move to something like Linode or Digital Ocean or cloud66.com

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avenger123
Is it really that involved to manage your own server? Especially if you are
starting out and its just one or two servers. There's so many good guides out
there that I would say might be worthwhile to spend that time now.

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bliti
It does take time due to the security risks to be managed. But its not that
much time and can be mostly automated. If the OP is new to server management
then it might be a bit uphill.

~~~
avenger123
Have you done any Django installations? I have a VPS with Ubuntu 12.04 and
looking at how best to go about this? Currently looking at Chef.

~~~
caw
I run a Django app on AWS Ubuntu machines managed by Chef. I have my own chef
server, but you could also do hosted Chef to avoid the extra infrastructure.

Basically chef bootstraps the node from EC2, since you can only give it an
initial keypair. Chef server will SSH into your box and install user accounts,
the firewall, the webserver, tweak some settings (like mounting EBS volumes,
restricting SSH, etc), install virtualenv and python. We use fabric to deploy,
and that's when the code installs Django and whatnot in the virtualenv, as
well as put the code on the machine.

Can't tell you if Chef is the best option. It's what I've been learning but it
does have some rough edges. Finding the "right" cookbook is hard, because
Opscode's listing isn't always the best. If you have concerns about using any
particular setup to keep your environment homogenous (e.g. all init, upstart,
runit, or supervisor) you'll have to put in quite a bit of work.

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steerj92
Personally, I love Heroku. It's amazing for scaling your application. Don't
jump in the deep end with AWS, scale your site easily with Heroku.

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bliti
I would start on the free Heroku stack and if it grows then move it to a good
webhost, then to a VPS, then to AWS (or your own boxes).

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tomnewton
Three words... Google App Engine.

