

AppHarbor adds RavenDB support - friism
http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/02/17/hosted-ravendb-on-appharbor

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philjones88
RavenDB is an excellent document database for those of us who still have to
(or choose to) use .NET. Personally its one of the last remaining factors when
I reach for .NET over other tools.

Combining RavenDB with AppHarbor will be a great development story. Even
though AppHarbor's new pricing (IMO) does put off small projects and MVP
projects, I still plan to migrate one of my bigger clients to AppHarbor and
(hosted) RavenDB as running a VPS is a drag. Just need to get up the
motivation to write some code to store PDF files onto S3 rather than the
filesystem.

~~~
nreece
>> Even though AppHarbor's new pricing (IMO) does put off small projects and
MVP projects

Their first instance (aka worker) is free so it can be easily used for small
side-projects (but maybe not MVP's). The first instance has access to about
half AWS ECU and 1GB of memory. A 20MB SQL Server Express database (on Shared
server) is free.

I do agree however that their pricing (and that of cloud hosting in general)
is a bit high for bootstrapped startups, considering the low cost of a VPS
now-a-days. In many cases, it also takes a lot of time to make your app work
seamlessly with cloud hosting, when you should be spending that time on
finding customers.

Some issues (for us at-least) made us move to a VPS and implement our own CI
environment for now (fully automated builds and deployments using TeamCity and
MS Web Deployment). This is not to say that AppHarbor is not worth it, but we
faced some issues:

1\. Lack of sticky sessions forces you to work with Memcache, when IMO it's
not really required in the initial stages of a product.

2\. Another issue is the lack of persistent storage (file system), since
AppHarbor (rightfully) wipes off the entire space on each deployment. It
essentially forces you to design/redesign your app to utilize something like
S3 right from the start. Again, 99% of the startups can live without worrying
about all that in the initial stages of the product.

Every hour spent on pre-mature optimization and scaling without having any
customers, is an hour wasted.

~~~
philjones88
Yes, the pricing change is fine if I just want to throw up some private side
projects, but for an MVP product, no. With an MVP product I would want to have
a custom domain to make it look more professional and to share with the world.
Sure $10 a month isn't a huge deal but I have two MVP products on a VPS at the
moment that barely get any traffic whilst I figure out feasibility and if they
will work.

Heroku doesn't charge for custom domains, but I would prefer AppHarbor went
PHPFog's way of only allowing 3 free apps and charge $5 for those to have
custom domains.

I've written three blog posts on the whole AppHarbor pricing change and just
believe they are missing a whole subset of the market. In my final blog post
on their new pricing I suggested someone could potentially fill this void by
providing a subset of AppHarbor features as a kind of "baby" AppHarbor that is
designed for small hobby/MVP projects that don't need features like multiple
workers, load balancing rather just a better experience (git push) over shared
hosting (ftp).

