

Cloud Star Heroku Preps for Second Act With New CEO - sinzone
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/new-heroku-ceo/

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mberning
I was a big user of Heroku for a long time, but at some point over the last
year or two it became more cost effective and performant for me to run my
projects from an Amazon EC2 instance.

The problem that I experiences is that I wanted my sites to have great
performance, even though they only got hit a few times per day. This precluded
me from using the Heroku free tier since idle dynos are swapped out and take a
considerable amount of time to spring back to life. No big deal, I could just
pay for 2 dynos and my app would never idle. Some time after that my postgres
database exceded the free tier limit and the only option was to pay $20/mo for
a shared postgres DB that was way beyond my needs.

I went from an extremely modest website costing nothing, to an extremely
modest website costing over $20 per month.

I switched all of my projects over to an EC2 instance and pay about 15 bucks
with no arbitrary limitations.

I hope the new CEO understands that building a healthy customer base means
giving people a sensible path for growth.

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jaggederest
I don't really mean to be offensive when I say this, but you're almost
certainly not the target market for them. They're looking at people growing
from initial concept to 3 dynos to 30 dynos, and if your app won't do that,
then they have no incentive to cater to you, as far as I understand it.

~~~
mberning
How is my app going to grow from 2 users per day to 20 users per day if it
takes 30 seconds to un-idle my dyno? The answer is it won't because the end-
user experience sucks on Heroku.

My bottom of the barrel Amazon EC2 instance gives much better performance for
a very reasonable $15/mo.

If one of my apps does start to get traction and I need to increase my hosting
capacity you can rest assured that I will do it with Amazon. I have no reason
to convert my build & deploy process back to Heroku.

They lost any future sales they could have hoped to have gotten from me.

~~~
dantiberian
As jaggederest said, you're not the target customer for Heroku. They are
interested in hosting apps that have thousand's to hundred's of thousands of
visitors a day for companies like RapGenius who don't want to focus on
managing servers. It seems like you don't realise that Heroku is _giving_ you
a free dyno to run your apps on. If what they're offering for free doesn't fit
your needs that's fine but don't be ungrateful about it.

~~~
rgbrgb
I don't see what's wrong with pointing out deficiencies in the free tier. It's
not as if Heroku is giving devs something out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's part of their business model. He's just telling us that he doesn't use
Heroku for his projects anymore because their dyno's take so long to warm up.
I don't work at Heroku but I think their strategy is to make it a great /
cheap platform to start an app on so that you pay them when your app gets
traffic and needs to scale. If the free offering isn't compelling then the
freemium business model doesn't work.

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wilfra
I don't understand how they can write that article without mentioning
RapGenius or even alluding to that fiasco. Wired just lost some credibility in
my mind.

~~~
nfm
Why should they mention RapGenius? At Heroku, I expect it's very much back to
business as usual.

~~~
wilfra
Did you read the article? They replaced their CEO and are strategizing about
their 'second act' after being displaced as the 'darling of the developer
community'. The article quotes the current CEO as saying he is considering
cutting off all existing small devs and focusing on the enterprise market.

If that's business as usual, I'm really curious what a crisis looks like.

As for why RapGenius should be mentioned - they were the catalyst for all of
the above. Without them, this article never gets written in the first place.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I wouldn't blame them for cutting off the free tier that allows one dyno to
run for no cost. They should charge at least $10/month for what is now the
free tier, and not time out apps (requiring loading requests). Make the small
customers real paying customers.

The thing is: I don't understand why a large company would use Heroku because
of the costs. Heroku seems like the sweet spot for a 3 or 4 person company
where they don't have the economy of scale to manage their own servers.

