

Ask HN: Difference between Heroku and Web Hosts - troq

What is the difference between the two? On its about page Heroku states that it host web apps, but can't a web site be part of a web app? What is the difference?
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benologist
There is no particular difference between a web "site" and a web "app", they
are both very broad definitions that usually boil down to the same thing -
very vanilla CRUD database operations (create, read, update, delete) behind a
pretty page.

The difference between Heroku and most web hosts is what happens when your
requirements increase.

With a conventional web host you will scale vertically which means at each
growth milestone you move up to the next plan eg starting on a $5 basic shared
plan and eventually growing up to the $10 and $20 and $50 and $100 per month
plans and finally separate db and web servers.

With Heroku you design your application to scale horizontally so you add more
capacity (dynos) and that capacity means you can support x% more traffic
unless other bottlenecks get in the way like database load which Heroku and
many of their partners also provide in scalable fashions.

