

Ep.io is closing down, recommending Heroku - goblin89
https://www.ep.io/blog/epio-closing-down/

======
sriramk
I think you'll see a slew of these closures.

\- The PaaS space is getting squeezed on all directions; from the bottom by
CloudFoundry and from the top from people like Heroku, Amazon and from
startups like Parse chopping off verticals. Building a proper PaaS platform is
a _lot_ of work - tons of little edge cases, security concerns, scale
concerns. All of it is very non-trivial and you can't just focus on one little
scenario and hope to get away with it.

I suspect you'll see more people going the Phpfog->AppFog route, give up the
general PaaS platform to CloudFoundry/Amazon/Heroku and try and move up the
stack to provide value on top. I have no idea how DotCloud is doing but I'll
be very surprised if they're doing well. I I love the team but I think they
are in a tough spot.

~~~
andrewgodwin
(I'm one of the two Epio founders)

Obviously, we have an interesting view on this whole problem. I'm personally
of the opinion that PaaS is still not quite the right solution - there's
certainly some progress, but there's such an murky boundary between what a
platform and an app provides that it's hard to make something that doesn't
surprise people in some way.

It's interesting to note that as a PaaS platform you do get an advantage over
IaaS - you can share resources and box-pack apps a lot more efficiently when
you control memory and disk access at that higher level, so it's not like IaaS
is certain to win either.

I probably need to compose my thoughts into something more intelligible and
write a full blog post about how I think deployment should evolve, but I have
a migration to shepherd first.

~~~
amoore
Did you consider attempting to sell your business? What prevented you from
doing that?

~~~
kingrolo
Yeah, indeed. I'd have thought the provisioning code and tools could be useful
(IIRC was there some custom thing which ran pip installs in parallel)?. I'd
certainly donate some money and dev time to help encourage an open source
version of the provisioning and build tools which would run any VPS.

------
dguaraglia
That's a pity. Ben and Andrew are two of the cleverest (and funniest) devs
I've ever met.

~~~
sad_panda
They're not dying or anything...

------
kingrolo
Boo. Such a shame. Of all the PaaS offerings Ep.io was the one I was really
rooting for. There was a real personal feel to the service - support email
repies from Andrew directly, and an always active IRC channel.

PaaS sounds like it could make my life so much simpler. I've tried out Ep.io,
Heroku and DotCloud, and have test apps continuing to run in all of them but
none of them are quite right yet for me to trust a client's production site
in, so I'm yet another person replicating using Linode VPSs and a custom build
and provisioning script.

Best of luck to all involved with Ep.io, and it's commendable to see their
dignified plan including working with helping their customers move away to
other services.

~~~
bastichelaar
I'm very curious what's not right with the mentioned services? Why don't you
trust them yet?

------
orblivion
Kindof worrisome that you can't seem to rely on these interesting hosting
services because they're liable to go out of business in a few months. That
said, it's nice that these guys give over a month to migrate, and
instructions.

~~~
Ixiaus
That's a risk you run using services provided for by anyone other than
yourself. My bank could suddenly go under and I would have to switch banks...
It's not just in the software world, that's anything.

------
denzil_correa
I believe they were one of the best hosting providers for no-frill Python
Django web apps. A lot of Python web app developers like me would appreciate a
dedicated, easy migrate Django hosting website. Alas! :-(

~~~
goblin89
Agree. Heroku appears inferior to Ep.io in terms of how easy you can get a
Django website up and running, and less flexible.

In our case, we use Brunch (node.js-based tool) to build client-side code.
With Ep.io, we'd just build the code locally and then do `epio upload`. While
Heroku requires everything to go through repository. Since it's impossible, I
think, to run a Node.js tool directly on Heroku, we'd need to `git push`
compiled code. It is not nice.

~~~
zrail
You can basically do anything you want on heroku because they allow custom
buildpacks. You could make your own buildpack that vendors in node.js and your
tool and builds at deploy time. Here's a heroku doc article all about it:
<https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks>

~~~
goblin89
Thanks for the correction, I didn't read the docs carefully. Buildpack's a
better idea than building stuff locally. This makes slightly steeper learning
curve the only weakness of Heroku compared to Ep.io.

~~~
zrail
No problem. They don't actually talk about buildpacks all that much but I see
it as the major differentiating feature on Heroku.

One thing you may be interested in is heroku-buildpack-multi[1] which lets you
run multiple buildpacks. You could theoretically use this to include the
standard Python and Node.js buildpacks plus a small custom one that just
installs and runs Brunch.

[1]: <https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi>

------
niels
Sad to see them go. We were hosted with them and really liked their service.
Good luck to Andrew and Ben.

------
ericd
When you guys say that you're going to make servers not suck, can you share a
bit more about what you mean? Are you referring to dedicated hosting?

------
kilian
I'm sad to see epio go, it was/is a great tool and I always got stellar
service from Andrew and Ben.

I've been using Ep.io for a number of apps, but one of them is
<http://laserey.es>, which uses openCV. Andrew installed it on epio without a
hitch, but I haven't found any other cloud hosting that offers it. Does anyone
have suggestions where I could migrate it to?

~~~
Estragon
You might find this comment suggests a way to do it on heroku. (Wishy-washy
language because I have no direct experience with buildpacks.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860312>

------
oellegaard
Too bad! Still no django-focused hosting options :-(

~~~
jacobian
Trust me, you really don't want a Django-specific hosting environment.
Django's a WSGI framework like the rest of the Python world (even moreso as of
1.4). Supporting any WSGI app is in some ways _easier_ than just supporting
Django, so I can't see any good reason why a platform provider wouldn't
support any WSGI app. Further, why would _you_ want to choose a platform that
locks you into a particular tool? Django's far from the only good choice in
the Python web world; don't pick a tool that forces you to put on blinders.

~~~
webmaven
What would you recommend as a WSGI-specific hosting environment, then?

~~~
jacobian
I've been happy with Heroku, Dotcloud, and Webfaction. Of the three,
Webfaction's the only one that's Python-specific (although not really), but
both Heroku and Dotcloud have Pythonistas on staff and take Python support
really seriously.

------
malkia
I smiled, because such caring about clients knowing the company goes down is
simply good stuff. Kudos!

------
japhyr
Does anyone have any feedback about OpenShift by Red Hat?

They were at PyCon and it sounded interesting. I tried openshift and heroku,
and heroku was easier for me to get up and running with, but I am still
interested in OpenShift.

------
rdl
Kind of surprised you didn't do a sale to Heroku or DotCloud (or another PaaS
or an IaaS), maybe as an aqui-hire. If nothing else, convert income into
capital gains.

------
okal
Sad to see you go. <http://zipf.ep.io> got me my first dev internship.

