

Ask HN: What is your experience with Heroku? - workhere-io

Heroku and the promise of no systems administration sound tempting, but...<p>Is the uptime satisfactory? It&#x27;s worrying that Heroku&#x27;s Standard production databases at $50 or more a month have &quot;up to one hour of downtime per month&quot; (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heroku.com&#x2F;pricing)<p>How about support? The standard free support mentions &quot;1+ day response times&quot;, which sounds a lot worse than what e.g. Linode offers.<p>Are page speeds okay?<p>Do you have personal experience with high-traffic sites running on Heroku? The reason I ask is that I seem to recall someone mentioning here on HN in an earlier discussion that Heroku is alright for smaller sites, but not for high-traffic ones.<p>Does Heroku offer any value for people who know how to set up servers but are inexperienced with larger setups &#x2F; load-balancing?
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mattwritescode
I personally like them. They are a great service for developer who want
something that will just work.

Uptime they are good no noticeable problems and the network speeds are
excellent. They are actually built upon amazon cloud.

The downside is the cost. Yes, they get your app up and running with little to
no maintenance but you do pay for the privilege.

Personally I use heroku as a development and deployment platform before moving
it to a cheaper solution once I have the time.

> Does Heroku offer any value for people who know how to set up servers but
> are inexperienced with larger setups / load-balancing?

Yes! time is money, so even if you know how to setup a server having it all
automated is a massive time saver.

That being said as you scale so will the cost. At some point you will want to
move provider and then you will be in the situation of still having to setup
and run your platform.

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workhere-io
_At some point you will want to move provider_

What's the reason for that? The price?

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dukekarthik
Price is one of the factor. The other factors could include control and
flexibility in terms of monitoring etc.

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jw2013
I deployed many apps on Heroku including but not limited to: Ruby/Rails,
Python/Flask&Django, Ring/Clojure, Node.js/vanilla without framework&Express(I
haven't tried Hapi there, but yes Heroku support it), PHP/vanilla without
framework.. I want to say they are so good at letting you deploying all
different kinds of languages/framework at ease.

One caveat is that Heroku is a ephemeral filesystem on each Dyno. So if you
want to save the file content on the fly, you probably also need to use
services like AWS S3. One time in a hackathon I tried to deployed a shared
proxy for letting different users share the same html DOMs, and I need to save
all the resources user requested from remote server. Since the time limit I
just completely switch the site to be hosted on elastic beanstalk (because I
never tried Heroku with S3 before). Using Heroku + S3 is actually easy, later
I found out. But having to use another storage host might be something you
want to know ahead before you try heroku.

>> Are page speeds okay?

It's very slow for the first request, if your site haven't been visited for a
while. ("If your application is unused for a while it gets unloaded from the
server memory" Quoted from Stackoverflow.) But afterwards I find it fast
enough. But that also depends very much on your backend service and
infrastructure, so I can't make any promise even though my guess would be it
will be okay.

>> Is the uptime satisfactory?

Yes from my experience. I only had very few downtime. One experience I learnt
in the hard way is at least have some mechanisms to alert yourself when the
site is down. (So you can get up in 3am to fix the issue!!!)

>> Do you have personal experience with high-traffic sites running on Heroku?

How high is your traffic?

>> Heroku and the promise of no systems administration sound tempting, but...

I love their Add-ons. For example, simple things like a scheduler makes the
automation so easy.

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6thSigma
They can be expensive even for small sites. For instance, it's $20/mo for SSL
not including the certificate.

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imikushin
Heroku certainly is a huge time saver. And you certainly can build high
traffic apps if you use a stateless and reactive frameworks like Play, Vert.x
or Node.js. Even within the free limits.

