
Heroku vs. AWS Revisited - reedlaw
http://www.smashingboxes.com/heroku-vs-aws-revisited/
======
grey-area
As a low-value user experimenting with Heroku (and very impressed with their
setup), but potentially interested in moving higher value services there, this
is one thing which worries me - their billing is really vague _and_
retrospective, and they require a credit card even for free service if you use
any addons - there should be an area where you can set up billing alerts for
certain thresholds, and an option to set a threshold (right down to $0) for an
app where service will be cut off rather than continuing to bill. That would
provide peace of mind which I currently don't have about their services. I'm
sure having this would also free up their support as quite a few people seem
to go over limits by mistake.

A little experimental app could easily start to overrun limits without the
user knowing and run up a huge bill, and this is the only thing about their
service which I found unsettling - it gives the impression they're happy to
trick you into paying more than you wanted, which I'm sure is not the intended
one.

------
dasil003
It's a crime to make this comparison with the glaring omission of Engine Yard
Cloud which fits smack dab in the middle of these two options.

With Engine Yard you get a proven, scalable, and supported Rails stack, except
you retain complete control over it. You have a dashboard and support desk,
but you also have root access and the AWS keys. There is complete transparency
in what you are charged, and you can run anything you want, just add a chef
recipe, you don't have to be nickled and dimed by an add-on or external
service just because you need a different piece of software.

Heroku is great if it fits your use case, but if it doesn't then there's no
reason you have to go completely vanilla EC2.

~~~
dasil003
Why would someone downvote this. The mind boggles.

~~~
campnic
The original article was a commentary on Heroku with a short conclusion which
included a comparison to the authors experience with AWS. Your comment reads
like an ad for a third service which isn't at all related to the original
article. If the piece was a general analysis of the PaaS market, maybe it
would seem relavent, but to this particular topic it seem tangental. I can't
down vote you but I can understand why someone would.

~~~
dasil003
Okay but it's weird to jump straight to AWS when the exact complaints are the
strengths of a parallel platform on the same cloud provider. It would be like
if someone were saying they were leaving Windows for OS X because Windows is
not open source, and totally ignored the existence of Linux. I'd say
commenters would be within their rights to bring up the elephant in the room
without being accused of shilling.

------
CoachRufus87
"I assumed there would be an additional step needed to opt-in before being
billed"

Why would you assume this? I explicitly remember using the beta databases for
free with the understanding that with the continued usage of those products
outside of the beta period, I'd be charged.

Never assume. Always ask if you aren't sure.

~~~
campnic
I understand your point about not assuming, but I generally get negative
feelings about companies that don't communicate _clearly_ when they make
decisions for me that cost me money. I think that is the authors primary
gripe.

~~~
reedlaw
You're right. Compare the experience with AWS. They were clearly looking out
for their customers best interest whereas with Heroku, it's not so clear.

------
throwa
Try an opensource PaaS like Cloudfoundry. You can use cloudfoundry with bosh
to spin multiple ec2 instance and deploy across all of them and you can scale
up and down as you want.

I am not affiliated with Cloudfoundry and earn no money from them neither do i
have any formal relationship with Vmware. I am bullish on cloudfoundry and use
bosh multi-instance and multi-cloud deploy. You can see how cloudfoundry works
by testing the commercial version on cloudfoundry.com and the opensource
community based articles on cloudfoundry.org.

You can run Java, Ruby, Node, Python, PhP tec and comes preinstalled
Postgresql, Mysql, Mongodb, Redis, Rabbitmq.

Go give it a ride.

~~~
antonp
I was pleasantly surprised with their customer support, but unfortunately they
still miss a few features (not being able to run ssh commands on the server is
one) that prevent me from using AppFog for anything serious for now. I'm
keeping a close eye on them.

~~~
throwa
May be Appfog might work on enabling ssh because on local installs of
cloudfoundry, you can run ssh commands.

[http://blog.newrelic.com/2012/01/26/removing-the-
operating-s...](http://blog.newrelic.com/2012/01/26/removing-the-operating-
system-barrier-with-platform-as-a-service-paas-part-2-a-guest-post-from-adron-
hall/)

[https://groups.google.com/a/cloudfoundry.org/d/topic/bosh-
us...](https://groups.google.com/a/cloudfoundry.org/d/topic/bosh-
users/sdxVSidno5c/discussion)

------
colinbartlett
This is not a review. To call it that and for this to make it to the front
page is a disgrace. This is a blog-rant about a billing dispute with Heroku.

~~~
reedlaw
It's an update to a previous review (see the first link in the OP).

------
franklaemmer
I think Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) said once: "The best customer service is no
customer service".

Shameless Plug: There are much more cloud services out there these days. It's
not just two. Have a look at the PHP ones here:
[http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-
platforms...](http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/)

~~~
pestaa
I don't remember if this was my own or I read it somewhere else, but I
sometimes say "The best software is no software".

------
cicloid
It appears I still can open a support request in
<https://help.heroku.com/tickets/new?query=ticket>

What the new interface appears to do is that it forces users to RTFM. Probably
the first step every user in a self-serve system should do before opening a
ticket.

After you have searched for the info, then probably you should open a ticket.

Now, if you have premium support. That is a whole new story.

------
anuraj
Heroku as a highly abstracted PAAS built over AWS should definitely make it
easier for beginners. AWS is there if you need to hit the metal any time. Also
the cost of Heroku abstraction is the flexibility you sacrifice in order to
get things off the ground faster. You also lose out on new services introduced
on AWS regularly or have to wait till similar functionality is available on
Heroku.

------
neilmiddleton
Tickets are most definitely openable by all, but yes, it is true that the link
to open a new ticket is a little buried within the new help site.

As for current invoices amount, the old dashboard used to show you your
current usage. I'm not sure when this got lost, but the new dashboard doesn't
have it.

I can pretty much guarantee that Heroku are fully aware of both of these
problems and acting on them…

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andr3w321
Agree with OP. Heroku really needs to add a billing status screen. If you host
a free app it's confusing when they will start charging you for usage and how
much it will be. You can look at past invoices which shows your how many dyno
hours you used, but as far as I can tell there is no place to view this
information for the current month until your bill arrives.

------
saeedjabbar
I had a very similar issue as well with Heroku. Their support option is buried
away in the site. I had a few questions about billing that weren't clear.

When I did find it their customer service was just nasty. "He doesn't have
time..." after the fact I was willing to spend a couple hundred dollars doing
business with them. He told The irony here is heroku is owned by
salesforce....

------
amalag
A coworker set 'tenancy' on EC2 to dedicated not understanding that it meant
an extra $10 a hour charge!! The bill came in at a few thousand dollars that
month. He contacted AWS and said it was set accidentally. AWS actually
refunded the charges. From what i have heard, heroku doesn't do similar
refunds, maybe AWS doesn't refund heroku charges.

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klapinat0r
> _[...] believing they would remain free until their general release in_
> _August_ _. Heroku’s blog post indicated they would notify users prior to
> billing them._

OP then proceeds to cite the email which verifies just that: _"We will also
begin billing for the paid plans as of August 1st"_

Regarding opt-in, he has already supplied his payment info as an existing
customer.

Since OP expected this, and did not check in August, I can't help but feel
this rant is a bit unmerited. Blaming Heroku is not entirely justified here.

~~~
reedlaw
The email was a newsletter which contained many announcements unrelated to the
impending charges. I felt they should have made the notice much more prominent
and so I'm alerting other Heroku customers to be more vigilant.

------
gojomo
While I haven't yet had to open a ticket through the new interface yet, in the
past I've received rapid, competent direct answers from Heroku staff, both as
a 'free tier' and then (very modest) paid-level user.

So these knocks against Heroku don't ring true for me. I even have to wonder
if the author overlooked pointers/responses/notices (as with his opt-in-
before-billing-begins assumption).

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aaronbrethorst
I love Heroku and use it for everything, but I'd seriously reconsider AWS for
some of my bigger apps if I could just get Elastic Beanstalk for Rack apps.
Frankly, I'm shocked that this hasn't been released yet.

I'm an apps guy, not devops, and definitely not ops. I can manage an AWS
deployment if I have to, but it's not on my top ten list of activities that I
consider to be fun.

------
jarcoal
Tickets can still be opened by searching for something in the knowledge base,
then scrolling to the bottom.

Example: <https://help.heroku.com/search/django+settings>

That said, it is still way too difficult to find.

