We've had huge buy-in from Ruby as it's pretty difficult to set up and deploy a Ruby stack. Where as with PHP it's basically supported out of the box by pretty much everyone.
It's hard to sell Heroku which is why we have the free trial dynos. I find most people either love us see us as a huge value add, or don't understand why anyone would use us.
We're not simply a small abstraction layer, instead we support deployment at the application layer. Which again basically sounds like meaningless fluff unless you've already bought into the product. If I had to sum it up, i would say we're a company that provides a collection of small, sharp, extremely well integrated tools that seek to make your production development experience more pleasant.
For Ruby you get the app setup which is huge, but then you also get process monitoring out of the box so if your app goes down due to hardware failure we get paged at 3am instead of you. It's extremely easy to do things like have multiple staging servers, and I really like our CLI.
Instead of trying Heroku, I would recommend starting off trying out Heroku Postgres and using it through whatever server you deploy to right now. Get the credentials from the CLI.
On a production DB you get forks, and followers. We also have point in time recovery which is pretty fancy. Hacker destroy your DB? Forgot to schedule a backup? Rollback to 1 second before the deletions, and done. If you like Heroku Postgres, then I would recommend trying the dynos, and if not: agree to disagree.
For PHP the sell is management, stability, and consistency. If you're on a shared host your performance is very inconsistent
as well as your uptime. If you're on a VPS you have pretty decent performance but now you have to manage everything manually, and even then there's that uptime thing we're not 5 nine's but hopefully above most: https://status.heroku.com/uptime.
I honestly don't think we're right for every application, every developer, and every scenario. When we are though I hope to provide the best experience possible.
Right. OK so I had it placed correctly. Heroku is for guys that are not experienced in hosting, deployment, operations, or scaling. And that's a lot of small guys.
Where your customers get bitten is when their needs outgrow you, and it happens in weird ways (routing performance, multiple database types, scaling profile, management tools), and its different for each customer.
And you've nailed it as far as your target audience. So really, supporting extra bells and whistles for PHP is a way to capture more of that market - the small to medium shop run by a couple of dudes who have some shared host PHP app knowledge.
So, Heroku's value is really in its add-on services, not its hosting, or its scaling. PHP shops feed your every day hosting provider, so if Heroku can consolidate that market its a big win for Heroku. The taste in my mouth is this was spun as innovation when its not.
It's hard to sell Heroku which is why we have the free trial dynos. I find most people either love us see us as a huge value add, or don't understand why anyone would use us.
We're not simply a small abstraction layer, instead we support deployment at the application layer. Which again basically sounds like meaningless fluff unless you've already bought into the product. If I had to sum it up, i would say we're a company that provides a collection of small, sharp, extremely well integrated tools that seek to make your production development experience more pleasant.
For Ruby you get the app setup which is huge, but then you also get process monitoring out of the box so if your app goes down due to hardware failure we get paged at 3am instead of you. It's extremely easy to do things like have multiple staging servers, and I really like our CLI.
Instead of trying Heroku, I would recommend starting off trying out Heroku Postgres and using it through whatever server you deploy to right now. Get the credentials from the CLI.
On a production DB you get forks, and followers. We also have point in time recovery which is pretty fancy. Hacker destroy your DB? Forgot to schedule a backup? Rollback to 1 second before the deletions, and done. If you like Heroku Postgres, then I would recommend trying the dynos, and if not: agree to disagree.
For PHP the sell is management, stability, and consistency. If you're on a shared host your performance is very inconsistent as well as your uptime. If you're on a VPS you have pretty decent performance but now you have to manage everything manually, and even then there's that uptime thing we're not 5 nine's but hopefully above most: https://status.heroku.com/uptime.
I honestly don't think we're right for every application, every developer, and every scenario. When we are though I hope to provide the best experience possible.