

Can Heroku (YC W08) Become the Official Cloud of Facebook Apps? - hshah
http://gigaom.com/cloud/can-heroku-become-the-official-cloud-of-facebook-apps/

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benatkin
Today I heard of <http://phpfog.com/> which might be good for Facebook apps
too.

I think the headline is a bit linkbaitish, especially because the bundle is so
specific. It's not just Heroku+Facebook. If you take away RPM and use
something else, the bundle is no longer cheaper. So it's for people who want
Heroku+Facebook+RPM.

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d0m
A bit out of subject but... the design of the overall Heroku website is just
fantastic. For every new sections added, I'm always amazed by how the page
looks great.

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andymoe
It is a great design except when you try and enter your credit card late at
night and have to think about your expiration date because it's on your card
as 03/13 and they make you translate it to March 2013 instead of just putting
the numbers in front of the month drop down.

Then you have to make sure the CC number is entered with or without the dashes
- I don't remember which. Then after you mess up the CC format they reset the
expiration date back to the defaults and you don't notice and then have to
start all over again for a third time. Great design - except for the part
where you try and pay them.

I emailed them about it but I guess they have better things to do or don't
want to offend their designers sensibility.

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seaofclouds
good idea. we've created a ticket for this request.

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andymoe
Future me from 2013 thanks you...

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nickpinkston
I wonder what the split between apps using the free instance and the rest of
their products is? Are 90K of the apps just free accounts? I bet 5K are just
people who went through RailsTutorial.org...

Still though - Heroku has a great service, and deserve their props.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
I imagine the breakdown is pretty heavily weighted toward free accounts. I
wouldn't be terribly surprised if 90% or so are free - I know I have a few
projects on there that are mostly idle deployments of weekend tinkering.
Personally, I haven't made anything yet that is "big" enough (ie generating
enough traffic/data) to warrant me taking the leap to a paid account.

That being said, their infrastructure is such that I imagine free accounts
only hurt them from a business perspective if they're consuming a lot of
resources (bandwidth, processor time). And even then, if that is the case the
user has probably already upgraded to a paid account. The overhead for idle
projects is low, as apps are spun up on demand and killed for inactivity.

As you said, it's a hell of a service.

    
    
      heroku create myawesomeapp
      git push heroku master
    

Doesn't get much easier than that!

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adaml_623
Well I like Heroku a lot but I think non Ruby Facebook apps are allowed as
well. Aren't they?

~~~
benatkin
Certainly. Facebook uses PHP, so it would be odd for them to support only
Ruby.

